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V 



L 



THE WORDS OF CHRIST 



AS PRINCIPLES OF 



PERSONAL AND SOCIAL GROWTH 



TOHN BASCOM 



AUTHOR OF PHII:OSOPHY OF RELIGION, ETC. 




G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

NEW YORK : 27 & 29 WEST 23D STREET 

LONDON: 25 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN 

1884 



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Copyright by 
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

1883 



Press of 
G. P. Putnatn's Sons 

New York 



INTRODUCTION. 



Men are peculiarly liable in all profound questions to 
find their attention so diverted by the accidents and pass- 
ing moods of any development as to lose sight in part of 
its underlying principles. This liability is especially great 
in religion. The truths of the revelation made us in Christ 
are united with innumerable historical facts, and so give 
occasion to endless criticism. These facts as facts are be- 
yond positive proof; these criticisms have no ultimate 
test of correctness. It easily happens, therefore, that the 
obscure discussions and the unwarrantable suppositions 
possible in these directions may confuse the primary and 
much plainer truths involved with them, and so bring the 
entire subject in our minds into confusion and uncer- 
tainty. 

It is not the facts of the New Testament in their pre- 
cise form, it is not the exegetical harmony of its truths in 
their occasions and in their details, that are the power 
working salvation among men. These may be settled in 
one way or in another way, or not settled at all ; they may 
conform to this opinion or to that opinion, or be amenable 
to no opinion, — the real redemptive forces of the world are 
not thereby altered. The redemption of society does not 
depend on the exact ways in which spiritual truth has 
been brought to us, but on the truth itself ; It Is not, 
therefore, materially affected by the range of uncertainty 
that pertains to the method simply. Redemption must 

iii 



iv INTRODUCTION. 

be wrought out, and is being wrought out, by living, 
present principles, finding their way into the thoughts, 
hearts, actions of men. Redemption is an organic 
process, going on at this very time, and is to be judged in 
its own nature without passing beyond the hour. The 
question is. What are those emotional truths which are 
subserving the ends of construction and of life in the 
social world ? Are these truths those of the Gospels, or 
are they not ? 

The exact facts of the Gospels may escape us ; we may 
easily cast on them endless doubts, and raise with them 
endless difficulties. They are shrouded by the gathering 
mists of many centuries. Not so is it with the truths of 
the Gospels. These have lost nothing and have gained 
much by intervening years. They are like light that is 
light at every point which it reaches, and may be pro- 
nounced on without reference to its sources ; they are 
like the light of the sun, which gains reflection and diffu- 
sion by the medium through which it is passing, and the 
things on which it is falling. 

This relation of the teachings of Christ to the events of 
his life gives the occasion of our present work. Without 
any light estimate of historic proof, we wish simply to 
waive it, and to inquire in v/hat relations the words of 
Christ, as they have actually reached us, stand to the 
problem of life. We wish to see w^hether the assertion, I 
am the way, the truth, and the life, can be sustained and 
verified by the constitution of the human mind and of 
society, and by the historical development which is in 
progress under our very eyes. This after all is the ulti- 
mate question. No matter what we may establish about 
facts which have now passed Into the oblivion of nineteen 
centuries, we must still ask. What are the controlling in- 



INTRODUCTION. V 

centives of the present hour? No matter what we fail to 
prove concerning these facts, we may still hold fast a 
spiritual faith, wholly defensible by virtue of the living 
and potent principles present with us from that place and 
that period which define the life of Christ. 

It may be rationally hoped that this consideration of 
the words of Christ, as an expression of the unchangeable 
forces and laws of the spiritual world, may help minds en- 
tangled in criticism, and losing belief by looking away 
from the light instead of in the very direction of the light. 
We may also be able, feeling how assured our real treas- 
ures are, and how much in hand we have them, to discuss 
with more quietness, fairness, and consideration, the ob- 
scure circumstances under which this bequest of truth has 
fallen to us. Having the spiritual personality of Christ 
distinctly before our eyes, it of itself will help us to ex- 
plain very many things in his life, and will also help us to 
crowd outward to the horizon those things we cannot 
explain. This is our entire purpose : to turn attention 
directly to the words of Christ, as holding the theory and 
the only sufficient theory of spiritual growth, the forces 
and the only sufficient forces wherewith to secure that 
growth. Whatever else may be doubtful, it is not doubt- 
ful that the spirit of the Gospels is the regenerative powder 
of the world. The kingdom of heaven is being brought 
forward in this very way, and in this w^ay only can it be 
completed. In the measure in which this is seen to be 
true, will all doubts and difficulties take a secondary and 
remote position ; will the path of life and the promises of 
life lie plainly before us. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER 

I. Personality in the Words of Christ 

II. Rationality in the Words of Christ 

III. Spirituality in the Words of Christ 

IV. The Law of Truth . 

V. The Law of Love 

VI. The Law of Consecration 

VII. Individual Growth . 

VIII. Social Growth 

IX. Growth of Society Historically 

X. The Natural and the Supernatural 



I 
i6 
35 
51 

72 

93 
116 
141 

167 
199 



YU 



THE WORDS OF CHRIST AS PRINCIPLES 

OF PERSONAL AND SOCIAL 

GROWTH. 



CHAPTER I. 

Personality in the Words of Christ. 

Development is the idea which has received more 
emphasis than any other in the past century. It gathers 
up and combines in one comprehensive movement those 
special facts and theories — the correlation of forces, the 
geologic stages, the origin of species, the growth of moral 
law — that have so profoundly quickened the human 
mind. Though this idea of development has been held 
but crudely, and been apphed but coarsely to the facts of 
the world, and so wrought some mischief, it is none 
the less the frame-work along which a great expansion of 
spiritual life is taking place. The moment any limitations 
begin to settle down on our idea of God, the moment 
any one element in his character — of necessity too 
narrowly conceived in all its elements — begins to assume 
fixedness, the spiritual life of the soul is straitened, and 
may easily be, strangled. The one conception of God 
which the mind always passes through, and leaves behind 
it only too slowly, is that of an outside agent or will taking 
its way with gigantic strides among physical things, and 

I 



2 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

bringing them into subjection and order by a force put 
upon them. Evolution necessarily corrects this concep- 
tion, and compels us to seek anew for God as an ab- 
solutely pervasive presence, walking in the silence of 
power and clothed upon with all the visible facts of the 
world. 

This idea of development in the physical world should 
be supplemented in the spiritual world by that of growth, 
which finds its first expression in life, and its full expres- 
sion in conscious life. Development is the slow con- 
currence of all constructive parts in the formation of one 
whole. The whole is the simple product of the parts. 
The parts furnish in their own nature both the material of 
the work and the lines of its dependence. The whole 
discloses nothing which is not in its constituents. 
Growth is more than this. A power of some sort, work- 
ing toward a definite product, uses material for a construc- 
tive purpose not embraced in its own physical properties. 
Thus each living species is anomalous in the world. The 
world elsewhere and otherwise shows no such power. We 
may explain all the world besides, and we have not ex- 
plained the rose, the butterfly, the man. 

What the spiritual world has to do with primarily is con- 
scious growth, the unfolding of a life known to itself and 
pushing more or less distinctly toward the conditions of 
progress. In treating and discussing this life, we need to 
bear with us the ideas which belong to growth rather than 
those which pertain to development. 

If we undertake wisely and somewhat extendedly to 
secure growth in society, we shall be increasingly impressed 
with the fact, that the difficulties in our way are chiefly 
those which pertain to the strictly personal elements. 
Though there are exceptional facts, the position of a per- 



PERSONALITY IN THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 3 

son in society is usually defined by the spiritual terms 
which he brings to it. Close observation generally dis- 
closes personal grounds for personal difficulties. Though 
one may be depressed by his circumstances, the removal 
of this outside pressure is rarely a radical solution of 
the problem. Some other difficulty is immediately dis- 
closed which still blocks the path of progress. Still less 
does an outside lift meet the ends of growth. Unless 
it stands in close relation to an inside power pushing 
in the desired direction, the breaking down or overleaping 
of barriers may readily act like the bursting of the skin of 
the grape, letting in agents of destructive fermentation. 
In all living things there are buds, constructive points and 
constructive powers, and outside influences that are not 
addressed to these are more likely to be injurious than 
beneficial. 

The one truth that experience and history impress upon 
us is that the problem of growth is primarily an interior 
one, and that social progress, therefore, is always gathered 
up and expressed in personal progress. Nothing will 
reach that which does not reach this, and nothing which 
reaches this will fail to extend to that also. The 
spiritual world is what its spiritual occupants make it 
to be, and the Kingdom of Heaven can only come as 
it comes in the hearts of individuals. And so it becomes 
a problem of immense labor to carry the individual 
forward through all the slow stages of growth in concert 
with other individuals to the point in which strength and 
wisdom and peace abide in each singly and in all 
collectively. 

The long stages of growth which lie behind us and lie 
before us become painfully evident, and we are tempted, 
changing the idea of growth for that of development, to 



4 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

feel that nothing can either be accelerated or retarded by 
us ; that, phrasing it philosophically, we have only to 
keep pace with events ; or, phrasing it religiously, to wait 
on God. This feeling is at bottom unfaithfulness to the 
central idea of conscious growth as a power which pro- 
poses its own ends and pushes for them. 

If we look a little more closely at the secret of our own 
lives, we shall see how the case stands. Men at first, full of 
enthusiasm, have a tendency to rush into each other's arms 
in friendship. They think that at least one or more points 
of reciprocal interplay and absolute harmony can be found. 
They try it, and in proportion as their natures are deep 
and sonorous with one result. The instruments are not at- 
tuned ; the movements are not in time. Deficiency here 
and excess there bring a sense of disappointment. They 
slowly separate, like two molecules whose beat is not the 
same, that each may get room enough for its own un- 
rhythmical movement. Conditions of close spiritual rela- 
tionship hardly exist as yet between any two men. The 
soul is rather startled in its progress by its own growing 
solitude. When oppressed with such an experience, the 
wise man does not feel that he has grounds of complaint ; 
that the key-note of life is with him, and that others make 
the discord. He is rather impressed with the fact of how 
extended, difficult, and complicated a combination is a 
true spiritual symphony. How many things in one's self 
must be increased, diminished, modified, eliminated, before 
he can successfully take part in it ; while the same is true 
of those about him who are best fitted to unite their expe- 
rience with his experience. How little right has any one 
to find fault with these discords ; or, if he assumes the 
right, how thereby is he carried still farther off from the 
desired harmony. 



PERSONALITY IN THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 5 

One, who, breaking out of the bower of his own enthu- 
siastic thoughts, makes this discovery on the barren glebe 
of Hfe, either sinks back into despondency, and so loses 
himself without gaining another, or, more wisely, he takes 
up as a mere tyro the laws of growth with his fellow-men, 
fits himself coarsely to general relations, feels his way 
slowly to closer adjustments, expects much from himself, 
demands little from others, catches quickly at all harmo- 
nies, and without ever losing the light of his own life, 
opens a casement-door, east or west, to all the light that 
may enter from abroad. He understands that the general 
must keep pace with the particular, and that no two men 
can heartily embrace each other, till they are ready also 
to embrace all true men. 

Some may feel that the things now said pertain to 
poetry rather than to religion ; are an affair of sentiment 
quite as much as of faith. Such a conclusion is greatly to 
be regretted, for religion is the harmony of life with life, 
and so the fulness of all life. The problem we have every 
one to do with is, what are the successive steps of this 
inner and this outer concord which is to be reached only 
by an immense amount of personal change ? 

Plainly the Kingdom of Heaven, as one of spiritual 
peace and composure, has much to do and most directly 
to do with this reconciliation of life with life, this sym- 
pathetic enlargement of life toward life on the highest 
plane of action and feeling. Poetry and religion are not 
separable from each other, when they touch the highest 
subjects in the highest way. While the one great thing 
in religion hitherto is the love it has begotten, the one 
curious thing is the hatred it has occasioned. 

Some think that social progress — and there is no social 
progress that is not spiritual progress — suffers most from 



6 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

outside obstructions, and that these removed, growth will 
be rapid. A few sporadic facts may be so explained, but 
this is far from being an appreciative statement. When 
the personal conditions necessary for advancement exist, 
but exist under the repressing force of unfavorable circum- 
stances, growth will be very manifest when these restraints 
are removed. Progress, following instantly on relief, will be 
vividly associated with that relief, and exclusively referred 
to it. It will always be easy, therefore, to maintain a striking 
argument tending to establish the dependence of social 
growth on the circumstances that define social conditions. 
Social science demands exceedingly broad and exceedingly 
thorough inquiry, and must long suffer from the ease with 
which opinions of a superficial order can be defended. 
The mind can dart about on the surface of social facts, 
like a water-fly, just dimpling with its motion the current 
beneath it. 

Spiritual progress may be greatly burdened and greatly 
lightened by social conditions, but the controlling fact is 
none the less the spiritual forces with which we have to 
do. It is in reference to these alone that any institutions 
are either aids or hindrances. Places, times, and circum- 
stances derive their significance from the persons who 
occupy them. This fact is disclosed almost as clearly 
in the idea of evolution as in that of growth. If we 
look to physical forces for germs of life, it is not 
to physical forces in their ordinary action, but in 
some peculiar action which a small portion of them 
take on at remote intervals and on rare occasions. More- 
over, each living thing, as representing a species, is the 
result of a very protracted and very peculiar development, 
and by so much and by so long, has been separating itself 
from the simple staple of physical forces, and accumula- 



PERSONALITY IN THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 7 

ting powers of supreme moment in the construction of all 
that is to follow. An assertion of an equality, therefore, 
between the external and internal conditions of life is in 
the highest degree unphilosophical, since it is the over- 
throw of this equality of values that the world has 
been about from the very beginning of time until now. 
When we add to this general consideration, the considera- 
tion that in human life we are dealing with the most com- 
plex and peculiar of all powers, one separated in develop- 
ment by the largest space from the action of simple forces, 
when we remember that development itself has little or 
no light to cast on the first differentiations which consti- 
tute a germ, and very little to cast upon that steady 
increase of power by which the germ in its progressive 
specialization becomes the plant, the animal, the man of 
to-day, we shall scarcely be led, even for an instant or in 
a single case, to turn our backs on this entire history of 
the world, by levelling down in spiritual unfolding internal 
with external causes, and so opening the problem of life 
anew, as if nothing had already been done. To say that 
a solution is historical, is to say that a vast amount of 
difference has already appeared and been established and 
confirmed in the agencies now involved, and that our 
units are no longer equal units of force, but most unequal 
units with variable and prodigious accumulations of power. 
If we confront this view, which is rooted in reason, with 
the facts of the social world broadly considered, we shall 
see that the two correspond ; that no climate, no soil, no 
geographical features, are uniformly associated with 
human progress, or separated from it ; and that no exter- 
nal conditions, except as they themselves are the expres- 
sion of spiritual power or are making way before it, bring 
any solution to human life. 



8 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

It follows from this fact, that the personal poivers are 
the supreme powers to be considered, watched over, and 
unfolded in human history, and that any effort which di- 
rects itself primarily to the amelioration or modification 
of outward conditions simply, can only be very partially 
successful at any one time, and, in continuous effort, must 
utterly fail. The problem of hum.an well-being will yield 
only to personal powers, and the fruit of ultimate labor 
in all grades of life must be in behoof of these poAvers. 

The method of Christ conforms to this principle in a 
Avonderfully complete and thorough way. All the extra- 
neous things to which the eye of man is speedily directed 
in seeking progress, or in convincing himself, in a more or 
less illusory way, of its attainment, are wholly set aside. 
This is not done by any formal statement, or with any ex- 
plicit denial of the service of secondary things, but by 
turning the attention exclusively to primary things, and 
shielding the eye from the confusion of cross-lights. 
Wealth and rank are the ostensible signs of progress, and 
are most universally associated with it in the popular 
mind. They do not appear at all as means of influence or 
marks of growth in the instructions of Christ. They are, in 
theory, quietly passed by as accidents in life, while, in prac- 
tice, they were left one side as blinding and confusing the 
human mind, at the very best unaccustomed to single 
vision. The eye was not only to be filled with light, but 
first filled with light of a spiritual order. This method 
was united in Christ with no asceticism, which is the op- 
posite error, but was a concomitant of purely personal 
power addressing itself to like powers. Wealth and honor 
take part in the teaching of Christ neither as attractions 
nor as repulsions; they are simply indifferent to it. 

When we approach knowledge, - we have to do with 



PERSONALITY IN THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 9 

something much closer to the Inner Hfe, yet capable of a 
cold separation from it. The Jewish world was oppressed 
in the time of Christ as very few communities ever have 
been with the usurped functions of formal knowledge. 
The precepts of the Rabbis were omnipresent, and bur- 
densome in the last degree. They were destructive of 
independent thought, personal responsibility, and every 
condition of individual life. They kindled and fed a con- 
suming fanaticism, which no conditions of progress could 
assuage or mollify. Christ, though naturally falling into 
this class, completely separated himself from it in method, 
and, lest the difference should be overlooked, drew atten- 
tion to it in the plainest way. He Instructs his disciples : 
Be not ye called Rabbi, for one is your master even Christ, 
and all ye are brethren. Call no man your father upon 
earth, for one is your Father which is in heaven. Yet, 
when he himself is called Rabbi, he does not return in an 
irritable way to the injunction, and so make of it a formal 
and minute rule. There is no more vigorous and search- 
ing rebuke in language than that contained in his censure 
of the spirit of proselytism, the winning of disciples to the 
forms of faith. Woe unto you Scribes and Pharisees, 
hypocrites ! for ye compass sea and land to make one 
proselyte ; and when he is made ye make him twofold 
more the child of hell than yourselves. The whole force 
of Christ's w^ords was to break down authority as external 
tyranny, and to build it again as liberty in men's thoughts. 
They bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and 
lay them on men's shoulders ; but they themselves will not 
move them with one of their fingers. 

What wonderful caution — wonderful carelessness some 
would think It — does Christ show in reference to organiz- 
ing his discipks. At his death, organization, immediate 



10 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

and prospective, was at its lowest terms. The narrow 
spirit of his disciples in this respect had been constantly 
repressed. It could get hold of no distinctions, much as 
it sought them. When Christ was crucified they were 
simply eleven men without leadership and without instruc- 
tions, save that they were to teach all nations. Many facts 
must have concurred, but this fact was doubtless a reason 
among others why Judas fell away. There was nothing 
which his narrow, selfish, prudent, and practical mind 
could grasp, in wealth, in rank, in organization, or in well- 
defined work even. What could such a mind do ? It 
could not root in this light soil. Christ also, in the whole 
course of his ministry, seems to have made no distinction 
between men and women, or to have implied any inferiority 
in women. 

This proof of the personal element in Christ's instruc- 
tions should, in illustration, be carried one step farther. 
There were two things closely associated with his work 
that might easily have overborne its fine intellectual 
force : his miraculous power, and the presentations he 
should make of the character of God. If there is any one 
thing observable in the miracles of Christ, it is their 
sobriety and restraint. Who shall give law to miracles, and 
how rarely in the world's history have alleged miracles 
been kept within the bounds of any wholesome purpose ? 
It is plain that Christ, in every portion of his ministry, 
Avas thoroughly aware of the stimulating and overpower- 
ing character of this sense of the Divine Presence which he 
bore with him, and constantly guarded himself and his 
disciples against it. As a consequence of this personal 
sobriety, all excitement was extinguished at once, and at- 
tention was exclusively directed to strictly spiritual truths 
and their spiritual enforcement. The unbelief neither of 



PERSONALITY IN THE ^VORDS OF CHRIST. II 

the popular nor of the Rabbinical mind was encountered 
by power. When the disciples were exultant at their 
earliest participation in this gift, they received the caution : 
Rejoice not that the spirits are subject unto you, but 
rather rejoice because your names are written in Heaven. 
Moreover, these supernatural manifestations were never 
disassociated either in Christ or his disciples with the 
rational, in some sense natural, conditions of faith — a state 
of mind concurrent with the facts. Some share of faith, 
both in giving and receiving, was the ground of the gift. 
If faith, the purely personal element, waned in the disciples, 
the power fell away with it. We find, therefore, the 
disciples of Christ well-nigh as circumspect in the use of 
this spiritual power as their Master, and never yielding 
themselves up to its intoxication. 

Purely personal development is easily lost in religion by 
false views of the character of God, and of the conditions 
of divine favor. Such opinions were so prevalent in the 
time of Christ that religious faith wrought very little 
change in personal character. The zealot simply intensi- 
fied, in a more or less troublesome and unfortunate way, 
certain ill-grounded opinions and actions, and was very 
likely to avenge himself for the unnatural restraints put 
upon him in one direction by license in other directions. 
Thus religion might easily make him a less lovable rather 
than a more lovable man, one less ready rather than more 
ready to be taken up into the true harmony of a spiritual 
kingdom. Christ taught that the merciful should obtain 
mercy; the pure in heart should see God ; the peace-maker 
should be called the child of God. The whole force of 
the Divine Presence, like light and heat, wrought for 
growth in personal qualities. There was no method of 
approach to God, and no unity with him, which was not of 
this personal, spiritual character. 



12 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

Christ brought his disciples close within the circle of his 
own personal qualities, gave them truth permeated with 
feeling, and passing before their very eyes into action. 
Personal qualities, therefore, found in the disciples 
rapid unfolding. The presence of Christ was like the 
sunshine of spring, in which change follows quickly on 
change. Any thing subject to these stimulating influ- 
ences must either grow or decay, and that at once. The 
attractive force of Christ's presence we discover in the 
eleven ; its repellant power is disclosed in Judas. In a 
less vigorous atmosphere the buds might not have pushed, 
and the mildew might not have followed. By this divine 
schooling of the thoughts and affections toward himself, 
Christ restored to the disciples a true conception of God, 
till He became a Pervasive and Benign Presence, whose 
clearest disclosure was in the Son of God. There was 
nothing, therefore, in the character of God, as at length 
apprehended by the disciples, to misdirect or repress their 
personal life,, but the reverse every way. 

But this supreme importance of the personal element is 
distinctly put by Christ in parables, illustrations, and 
principles. The shepherd leaves the ninety and nine and 
goes into the wilderness in search of the lost sheep. The 
Pharisee, as he stands at prayer in the temple, has no 
advantage over the publican. The humility of the one, 
as contrasted with, the pride of the other, makes an easy 
way for itself to the heart of God. The widow with her 
two mites bears off the divine approval. The life is more 
than meat, says Christ, and the body more than raiment. 
Not that which entereth into the man defileth him, but 
that which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man. 

Thus absolutely, in every direction, and in every par- 
ticular, did Christ ground his> instruction and his king- 



PERSONALITY IN THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 1 3 

dom on the personal element in its perfect freedom. 
Here is a kingdom that can be borne anywhere by any 
one, and can gather into itself all everywhere. It is as 
colorless as white light, and yet it brings out the native 
color of all things. It is organic, but organic after the 
model of the highest life ; each molecule is bound by a 
secret affinity to its own place and its own office, and to 
every other molecule in its place and its office. 

The part which this fact of a purely personal discipline 
plays in the kingdom of Christ will be more clearly seen 
if we contrast it with some of the aberrations of this truth 
that have attended on the history of the Christian church. 
An initial term in its theology is sin ; most of its doctrines 
turn on this idea. Fundamental as this fact is in the 
Christian system, it has easily been distorted, and made 
to play a false part in life ; and that because it has not 
been expressed in a personal way on a personal basis. 

The sense of sin has been intensified vaguely, as if the 
mind were to receive on this side its great recoil toward 
God. It has been spoken of as against a perfect law and 
an infinite God ; and things not sinful or sinful in a slight 
degree, mere forms of action, have been made to bear an 
immense load. The remedies of sin have become corre- 
spondingly artificial ; and this strong feeling, obscured and 
ill-directed, has been used to excite superstitious fears, to 
push forward devotees in misconceived lines of action, 
and to make the whole spiritual problem false and painful 
in its rendering. 

Because sin is so certain and so significant a fact, it is 
the more needful that it be dealt with directly in its 
individual forms and under its specific remedies. One 
may be aware of the seeds of disease in his physical con- 
stitution ; this is not an occasion for general alarm and 



14 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

random effort, but for careful inquiry and precise action. 
The problem of sin is not an abstract one, but one emi- 
nently concrete, capable only of individual interpretation 
and correction. In general alarm may be found a force 
working against needful remedies and aggravating existing 
evils. 

It often happens that those who suffer most from the 
maladjustments of society, fail to aid in their removal, 
when the occasion is offered. The evil being misunder- 
stood in its true sources, in the exact distribution of 
wrongs and so in their real correction, simply maddens 
the mind, — makes it blind, irritable, and exacting. There 
is much to be regretted in the relation of labor and capital, 
yet the laborer, misapprehending the extent and grounds 
of the difficulty, may easily and often does spoil a promis- 
ing experiment of cooperation by failing in that spirit of 
endurance, forbearance, and trust on which its success 
depends. He covets prosperity, but is not able to supply 
the personal terms on which it hinges. 

The same is true of the sense of sin. Ill-defined, unex- 
pounded in a personal way, it has left the mind eager and 
fanciful, driven it into absurd efforts, and withdrawn it 
from the only efforts which could be successful. It has 
led the ascetic to overlook actual sins and to create facti- 
tious ones, and so to pervert the functions of spiritual life 
by an inner fever of superstition. The nature of sin, 
above most things, requires constant disclosure and daily 
correction by personal and social experience. Sin lies in 
the violation of those individual and social laws by which 
the harmony of our life is reached. Sin is only seen cor- 
rectly in the light of a clear idea of the integrity of the 
individual and of society. Each man must understand 
how various the changes and how manifold that must take 



PERSONALITY IN THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 1 5 

place in himself, before he can either come into entire self- 
possession, or can contribute without disturbance his quota 
to the common weal, or receive from it a full share of its 
gifts. In other words, one must see clearly the Kingdom 
of Heaven in its constructive constituents and the paths 
leading to it, and at the same time be profoundly sensitive 
of the guilt of maintaining or placing any obstacle in its 
way. Sin is thus clearly defined by the want of conformity 
of the actual orbit of our lives to the perfect orbit toward 
which God is pressing them. The whole problem of reli- 
gion is first a personal and then a public one, and so Christ 
treated it. The fulness of each life and the harmony of 
lives, the harmony of lives and so the fulness of each life ; 
this is the new, the enlarging and changeable, conception 
which must guide our thoughts. 

The direct and primarily personal form which Christ 
gives to spiritual principles and the spiritual problem, is a 
most significant feature of his method, as contrasted with 
those of his own time, or with those habitual among men. 
He is never for an instant bewildered hy forms offering 
themselves in place of spirit ; or by conditions in advance 
of the powers they address. He rules the world from its 
only legitimate throne of authority, the soul of man ; and 
herein he discloses the permanence of his power. 



CHAPTER II. 

Rationality in the Words of Christ. 

When we speak of a thing as rational, we understand 
that it approves itself .to our knowing powers in their nor- 
mal action ; it is intelligible to them. Reason, as we are 
now to use it, is an inclusive term for our intellectual fac- 
ulties. We have various means of knowing, which give us 
distinct results with changing degrees of certainty. These 
faculties, taken singly and conjointly, acting in their own 
fields and under their own laws, define the scope of our 
knowledge. Reason also includes feeling, so far as feeling 
aids the action of an intellectual power. The microscope 
embraces not merely the lenses that transmit the light, 
but the mirror also which reflects light on the object un- 
der consideration. Our powers of comprehension are in 
many ways dependent on our feelings, and to this degree 
embrace them. 

That which conforms to our aggregate powers of know- 
ing is rational ; that which does not conform to them is 
irrational. There has often been connected with religious 
faith, though less now than hitherto, a prejudice against 
reason. Religious dogmas have refused to submit them- 
selves unreservedly to reason. If we use reason broadly, 
as we have now defined it, this repugnance cannot be 
justified. It arises partly from mal-judgment, and partly 
from mal-purpose. Error is wont to be made up of these 
two ingredients in variable proportions. There would 
hardly seem to be any statements more self-evidently true 

i6 



RATIONALITY IN THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 1/ 

than these. Every thing that is to be known is to be sub- 
mitted to the knowing powers. Every thing that is to be 
done in a conscious and wise way, is to be done knowingly. 
Knowledge and wisdom have one method of increase. 

There are some simple qualifications rather than limita- 
tions which these first truths call for. There are many 
things beyond our knowing faculties. These are of two 
kinds: those intrinsically — that is, by very nature — be- 
yond our knowledge, and those accidentally beyond it. 
We may arrive at the second class of facts through the 
testimony of others. To estimate and to accept the 
testimony of others is a part of our own rational action, 
and this indirect use of reason is as rational as its direct 
use. It is not without reason, but by reason, that we put 
ourselves, in suitable circumstances, under the guidance of 
others, ourselves setting limits to it. What we accept on 
the testimony of others must be in general harmony 
with what we know directly; and in case of a real con- 
flict, we are sure of an error on the one side or the other. 
Our direct knowledge gives a law to our indirect knowl- 
edge, for the very nature of knowledge and the standards 
of knowledge are contained in our own powers of knowing. 

The first class of unknowable things — those which lie 
beyond the circle of our faculties — is transcendental to 
us. We can have neither directly nor indirectly any 
knowledge of these facts. This is precisely what is 
meant by saying that they lie without the scope of our 
powers. Reason is shown in simply recognizing this fact, 
and in making no effort to transcend the limit. 

With this understanding of reason and of its offices, it 
is impossible to see how any objection can be made to 
the assertion that religious truths and all truths are 
amenable to reason — are indeed the products of reason. 



l8 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

Certainly no rational objection can be made to the state- 
ment, for that would be to take an appeal to reason 
against reason. Rationalism must be the height of 
reason and of religion also. Certainly no one will be 
found willing that any doctrine held by him should be 
called irrational. If any thing we hold is irrational, and 
can be shown to be so, certain is it that sooner or later 
some one will undertake this task, and, succeeding in it, 
will disperse the belief, as sun-light absorbs a mist. 

Only one thing can be said in resistance, and that is 
that the alleged religious truth is irrational only in the 
sense of transcending reason. But this means, if we 
speak understandingly, that it transcends all knowledge, 
since reason stands for our entire outfit of knowing powers ; 
and so it becomes irrational to affirm what we do not 
know and cannot know. If the statement offered is one 
which lies within the scope of the faculties, but outside of 
their present action, and is thus appropriately referable to 
testimony, it still cannot be inconsistent with a wise inter- 
pretation of our experience. To grant this would be to make 
our knowledge contradictory, and in the contradiction to 
yield to inferior authority — to wit, that of testimony. One 
must rely on his own discrimination, in the first instance, 
as the ground of his belief in any one. Mere statement 
carries with it no proof. If a man cannot trust himself in 
the first steps of knowledge, he cannot in its second 
steps. If, therefore, his own knowledge is contradicted, 
not apparently but actually, by the assertions of another, 
these cannot be accepted as a portion of his knowledge. 
Nor is the relation altered, if we refer the inconsistent 
assertion to Revelation. Our first empirical knowledge 
is God's disclosure to us of truth, and no later affirmation 
can be in contradiction therewith, without tumbling 
down the whole structure of knowledge. 



RATIONALITY IN THE WORDS OF CHRIST. I9 

This assertion of the ultimate authority of reason is 
strangely enough thought to be irreverential. Trust is 
felt not to be complete unless it has a measure of blind- 
ness in it. Faith is regarded as a resting on the unknown, 
not a resting on the known. Man is placed in ref- 
erence to God in an attitude of antagonism and con- 
trast ; all that disparages human nature is thought to exalt 
the Divine Being. This is a very feeble philosophy of sin, 
and is no philosophy whatever of righteousness. Right- 
eousness, right vision, right feeling, right action, are not 
thrust upon us in our weakness or our wickedness by 
divine power, but wrought in us, acting in conjunction 
with divine wisdom and grace. The highest point of 
spiritual light, that at which the work of God is most mag- 
nified and his revelation made most clear, is the mind of 
man, when the wisdom of God and the will of God are 
reproduced within it. When man is most debased, the plan 
of God, the grace of God, are most obscured. When man 
is most exalted, the work of God is most completely 
revealed. It is in the clear mind and pure heart that God 
is most 'divinely active and most uncovered in his action. 
There is no contrast but the closest union of the human 
and the divine in the apprehension of truth. God is not 
best represented by a priestess of Apollo, shaken by an 
overpowering frenzy, but by a prophet whose sober 
mind takes in a clear, calm, abiding vision. True rever- 
ence, identifying the divine .thing with the best thing 
everywhere, bows lowest in worship in the noonday light 
of truth. 

But the very nature of truth leads us to the same con- 
clusion. Truth, in all its forms, is a kind of vision, a 
breaking in of light within the mind itself. How plain is 
this in our senses ! What a marvelous world without us 



20 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

is addressed to something still more marvelous within us ! 
It is keen, inexplicable, and transforming sight and 
insight and construction that disclose to us the world in 
its brilliant light and gorgeous colors. Equally is it the 
complicated powers of intellectual vision that turn verbal 
statements into the permanent truths of science, or into 
the immutable laws of our social life. Nothing can do 
this but vision. Many things may make ready for vision, 
but nothing can take its place. Vision is reason, and 
reason is vision ; and without vision we grope our way 
under the government of some blind impulse. To come 
out into a large place is simply to be where we can see, 
feel, comprehend ; is simply to have gotten an outlook 
from one or another of the high places of reason, and 
to have been taken into the fellowship of reason. 

None will deny that science, in spite of all its limita- 
tions, is having a very beneficial effect on theology. It is 
helping to lay out afresh the highways and private paths 
of that beneficent action which is binding anew the world 
together in its. manifold physical and social dependencies. 
And what is this but giving a fresh and better definition 
of righteousness ? While science cannot reach to the very 
spirit with which the good action is to be done, it helps 
us immensely in defining the action itself, and so in truly 
holding within it the divine inspiration. While the right 
method demands the right spirit, the right spirit de- 
mands not less earnestly the right method. And the 
harmony of the two is the harmony of reason. Reason is 
a skilful cultivation of the plants of righteousness. Wis- 
dom is never seen to be wiser than when it ministers suc- 
cessfully, as in a garden, to various kinds of life which, in 
their secret forces, are quite beyond it. Progress lies in a 
perpetual enlargement of the action of reason. 



RATIONALITY IN THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 21 

There is one point of confusion in the relation of reason 
to reHgious truth, arising from the reflex action of feeling 
on apprehension. The fool hath said in his heart, There 
is no God. Practical religionists express this truth by 
saying : " If the Divine Spirit touches the hearts of men, 
scepticism will speedily give way to belief." Feeling, it is 
inferred, goes before belief, and the errors of belief must 
be corrected by a renovation of the heart. The relation 
here implied is a real one, but it only expresses an eddy 
in the stream, and not the main current ; an eddy that is 
itself the result of the current, and but slightly modifies it. 

What is the real difficulty in the spiritual action of the 
mind that is sceptical because scepticism is a partial 
defence against light which it is unwilling to receive ? 
Plainly this very thing, that under one or another pas- 
sionate impulse it has refused to put conviction in the 
foreground, and make conduct directly and completely 
dependent on it. Such a mind, whether it is subjected to 
the prejudices of belief or unbelief, has tampered with the 
eternal constitutional order of its own processes, and now 
requires that some simple truths should be thrown in upon 
it in a forceful way, like a shock of electricity, to restore 
its circulation. To do this is like putting a burning lens 
in the sun-light, and so giving the heat concentration enough 
to fire the fuel before it. This fact does not alter the laws 
by which light and heat perform their constructive offices 
in living tissue. When such a mind is awakened, it must 
resume that normal action by which truth is inquired into, 
and truth only partially felt is cheerfully obeyed. Observe, 
it is the fool who has said in his heart, There is no God ; 
one whose intellectual and spiritual organization is suffer- 
ing from paralysis. When we are inquiring after the 
hygiene of the soul, we are not to identify the remedies 



22 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

of disease with the means of health. Doubtless the 
feelings often give direction to the thoughts, and 
assume a certain government over them. This fact, in 
the many mischiefs which arise from it, does not 
alter the normal relation of the thoughts and feelings 
to each other, but emphasizes it rather. The feelings are 
always terms in the understanding of any broad, moral 
question, because these questions are always dealing with 
the feelings, and more or less terminate in the feelings. 
But those feehngs which are really able to elucidate the 
moral problem are rational feelings, feelings that have 
come under the previous government of the reason. The 
mirror in the microscope that helps vision, is one that is 
itself turned toward the light, and so can reflect light. 

Our reason should be emotional, and our emotions 
should be rational, and the only way to secure this result 
is to place each and to maintain each in its constitutional 
dependence. Sun-light must have heat before it can build 
up the plant, but we cannot get heat without also increas- 
ing the light ; the light, the heat, the actinic energy, 
come together and spring from one fountain. Our emo- 
tions may lose reason, and our reason may lose emotional 
force. In either case the result is fatal ; in either case we 
have salt that has lost its savor, fit only to be cast out and 
trodden under foot ; in either case we have but one 
remedy, to return to normal qualities and relations. 

The perversion of belief by feeling is a fact that touches 
the believer himself not less nearly than the sceptic. We 
know how absurd and pernicious religious faith may become 
in an unintellectual and emotional people like the negro 
race ; we know how blind and obstinate it may become in 
unprogressive minds. This separation is liable in different 
degrees to overtake religion in any place and in any person, 



RATIONALITY IN THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 23 

and so to result in that dangerous combination of intense 
feelings and convictions insufficiently sustained and 
guided by reason. Every measure of this division between 
thought and feeling is spiritual disorganization, and equally 
in the believer as in the unbeliever ; nor is the tendency 
to it peculiar to either of them. The constitution of the 
human mind is the divine constitution of the spiritual 
world, and that constitution is, that the eye is to be single, 
and the whole body is to be full of light. 

This simple and primitive relation of the reason to all 
spiritual action has been re-stated, in order that we may 
see more clearly its complete recognition by Christ. The 
intellectual atmosphere which Christ encountered was one 
peculiarly full of the mist of unreason and conventional 
opinion. A thousand things, with no foundation in the 
constitution of man or society, had fettered the force of 
religious convictions. The deep channels of truth had 
been choked up with the prolific growth of a stagnant 
pool. It was an aphorism that the Scriptures were like 
water, the traditions like wine, and the comments of the 
Rabbis like spiced wine. This submissive, dogmatic, and 
irrational temper Christ encountered at once with pure 
reason. One of the more justifiable of its requisitions 
was the rigid observance of the Sabbath. Christ, repeat- 
ing again and again his works of healing on the Sabbath, 
met the rebukes he called out with the first truths of com- 
mon-sense : What man shall there be among you that shall 
have one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the Sabbath- 
day, will he not lay hold of it, and lift it out ? How much, 
then, is a man better than a sheep ? Doth not each one 
of you loose his ox or his ass from the stall, and lead him 
away to watering ? And might not this woman, being a 
daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo, these 



24 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath- 
day ? He put a true estimate on the law of clean and 
unclean things in the simplest and most direct way. Are 
ye also yet without understanding? Do ye not yet under- 
stand that whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth 
into the belly, and is cast out into the draught ? But 
those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth 
from the heart ; and they defile the man. For out of the 
heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornica- 
tions, thefts, false witness, blasphemies : these are the 
things which defile a man ; but to eat with unwashen 
hands defJeth not a man. The clear, uncompromising, 
rational way in which these statements are made is not 
less remarkable than the statements themselves. They 
flash broad day-light into the dark corners of men's minds. 
They brush away like cobwebs the entire net-work of 
thinking and reasoning prevalent among the Pharisees. 

He encountered the Sadducees with a wide sweep of 
thought, in meeting their denial of a future life. Have 
ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, 
saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, 
and the God of Jacob ? God is not the God of the dead 
but of the living. The greatness of the assertion — so runs 
the argument — is preposterously reduced, if Abraham and 
Isaac and Jacob are no more. He corrects at once those 
who were desirous to refer the disasters of men in a direct 
way to their sins. Suppose ye that these Galileans were 
sinners above all the Galileans, because they suffered such 
things ? I tell you nay ; but except ye repent ye shall all 
likewise perish. Here is pure rationalism. The extreme 
follies of tradition he passes unnoticed, but he deliv- 
ers direct and telling blows against its more defensible 
positions. . .- 



RATIONALITY IN THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 25 

But attack In all ages is likely to be rational. The more 
important inquiry is, What is the new method of construc- 
tion and defence ? When John the Baptist sent his dis- 
ciples to inquire of Christ — Art thou he that should come, 
or do we look for another ? — he made no affirmation, he 
offered no argument ; he kept them with him for a time 
that they might see his works and hear his words, and 
then charged them with the message : Go and show John 
again those things which ye do hear and see : the blind 
receive their sight, and the lame walk ; the lepers are 
cleansed, and the deaf hear ; the dead are raised up, and 
the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed 
is he whosoever shall not be offended in me. 

He did not require his own disciples to recognize at 
once his divine attributes. Not till he had been with 
them for a long time did he ask them, But whom say ye 
that I am ? Even then the question seems to have been 
put chiefly to confirm their faith by a direct confession. 
Enclosed by the most narrow possible race-sentiment, na- 
tional, and religious sentiment, he affirmed that the heirs 
of his kingdom should come from the East and the West, 
the North and the South. 

His prevalent and peculiar method of instruction was 
parables. Evidently this form had some difficulties. 
The truths so declared made but an obscure impression 
on his disciples, accustomed as they were to a diverse 
style of teaching. On one occasion his disciples said 
unto him, Lo, now speakest thou plainly, and speakest 
no proverb or parable. What was the reason of this 
method ? The grand power of the parable is that it does 
not dogmatically deliver the truth, but must be inter- 
preted in its inner significance by the mind to which it is 
addressed. He that hath ears to hear let him hear, says 



26 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

Christ. He spoke to them in parables because they were 
so slow to use their powers, to see with their eyes and 
hear with their ears. The parable is not the very truth ; 
it only suggests it, and cannot be taken as a formal state- 
ment in place of it. It must be discussed, and that, too, 
spiritually. It is the shadow of a substance, the image of 
the truth, and the outline must be seen and the relation 
traced by each mind. The parable cannot be used with- 
out understanding it ; it cannot degenerate into barren 
dogma, nor into conventional phraseology. Christ was 
willing somewhat to lock up the truth, that men might be 
compelled to unlock it. Yet this concealment was, in 
fact, the most thorough possible disclosure. This instruc- 
tion is of the same order with that which we find in the 
world ; the truths of science are not statements, but 
things and events. No more rational appeal could possi- 
bly be made to the comprehending powers of his disciples 
than this of parables. They chafed under it simply 
because it demanded consideration on their part. It was 
no formal exhortation with which he gathered up the 
parable. He that hath ears to hear let him hear. 

Christ, in contrast with the Scribes, is said to have 
taught with authority. Evidently we are to understand 
by this the personal authority which immediately and 
inevitably attaches to clear and coherent thought, — the 
authority innate in reason. The authority of the past, in 
all its forms of law, tradition, and comment, was with the 
Scribes. The mind of Christ gave spiritual truths a new 
impulse simply by the directness of his appeal to the 
minds and hearts of his hearers. They were startled by 
this manner of procedure as something revolutionary in 
the religious world. It set aside personal authority with- 
out so much as stopping to question it ; it assumed the 



RATIONALITY IN THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 2/ 

authority of reason without even drawing attention to 
the fact. 

But Christ went still farther. He gave the underlying 
principles of reason clear statement. He likened his 
words unto perennial waters flowing out of the mind 
itself. He likened himself and his disciples also unto 
light. No image is so fit as this image. Light has 
but one character, one method, one supreme office. To 
play the part of light is to carry with us revelation and 
beget new action under it. Unreason is to reason the 
same oppugnant state that darkness is to light. To 
narrow reason at any point is to mar in its office the 
regnant force. 

Wisdom is justified of her children, is a formal state- 
ment of the same truth. The wise thing commends itself 
to the wise, and to them only ; the rational thing to the 
children of reason, and to them only. Reason is a 
condition of receiving truth, as well as of giving it. The 
pearls of truth are not to be cast before swine. Those are 
but swine who trample these pearls under foot, and that, 
too, as a preparation for brute violence. If, therefore, 
thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. 
John the Baptist is spoken of as a bright and shining 
light in which men were willing to rejoice. 

Where the claims of reason are put in a guarded and 
general form, men may be slow to deny them ; yet there 
is comparatively little of that religious faith w^hich re- 
fers itself to the words of Christ, that gives truth, as 
addressed to the reason, unqualified adherence. Take, as 
a single example, the doctrine of inspiration. Though it 
has become a very vague doctrine by being held in so 
many ways, and by being loosened again and again 
at some new point of pressure, the religious mind is 



28 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

not willing to yield it wholly. The anchor has been 
dragging these many days, yet the timid sailor does not 
dare to weigh it, and commit himself to the winds — even 
though they be the winds of heaven. Yet inspiration, 
so far as it means any thing beyond the rational and 
spiritual hold of truth on the human mind, is putting 
authority in the place of reason, and blind obedience in 
place of insight. Euclid does not need to be inspired, be- 
cause it has the final seal of manifest truth. It is only 
doubtful things that can be helped by inspiration, and 
timid minds that can be transiently sustained by it. 
Profound spiritual truths, like the love of God and the 
love of man, do not appeal less directly to our reason 
than those of mathematics ; nor do they owe their au- 
thority less to their inherent rightfulness. Spiritual truth 
is luminous in itself, and does not wait on exterior 
light. Correggio correctly conceived the facts when he 
surrounded the Babe of Bethlehem with an intense 
. halo, casting light on all faces. The inexpugnable truths 
of revelation are what they are, and do what they do, 
by virtue of an inner force and divine nature, that 
make themselves increasingly visible to every open and 
clear eye. Calm vision is what men need, and vision 
must be unconstrained. A command, a necessity, simply 
alarm and confound vision. The confused pupil can not 
see, because the teacher insists that he shall see, and see 
at once. All the cardinal declarations of Scripture are 
merely the frame-work of the spiritual universe of God, 
and if we would truly understand them, we must see them 
where they are, in the pathway of the Divine Reason as it 
moves among us creatively. The mind should not feel 
that it may stop short of vision, or that it needs any- 
thing beyond, vision. 



RATIONALITY IN THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 29 

But it may be thought, if fundamental moral truths 
must carry their own light with them, the same is not true 
of historic facts. Historic facts do indeed rest chiefly 
on testimony, and so we have always in them an element 
of authority. But that element can not in the Scriptures 
be inspiration. Inspiration is in this way put to an impos- 
sible use. We meet with two historical difficulties in the 
canon as regards authority: its own authenticity and 
the truthfulness of its writers. Of these two difficulties, 
the first is first in order, is incomparably the greater, 
and is beyond complete removal. Here we are and must 
remain on uncertain grounds of reason. Inspiration, 
if we allow it to be verbal, does not touch this difficulty, 
does not take hold till this difficulty is overcome. We 
have, then, by the doctrine of inspiration built an arch, 
planting, as w^e allege, one foot of it on the granite 
of the divine affirmation, and the other on the shifting 
sand of historic criticism. The result is incongruous and 
irrational. Our arch is seamed only the more quickly 
and the more dangerously by virtue of its unequal foot- 
ing. Inspiration can not do the work we wish it for, and 
it can greatly embarrass the mind in doing its own 
work. As regards moral principles it is a mere taper in the 
sun-light of truth, perplexing and vexing the vision ; as re- 
gards historic truth, it is no more effective than would be 
the addition of a glossary in settling the authority of a 
work, whose chief difficulties were found in connection 
with its authenticity. We burden ourselves with a super- 
lative embarrassment, the assertion of exact and sufficient 
truth in every statement of the Scriptures, and yet are not 
able to establish the Scriptures themselves. Every thing 
in the Word of God which presents a difficulty to reason, 
is made, by this doctrine of inspiration, to tell directly 



30 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

against their authenticity, which is the fundamental point 
of historic proof. It is far easier to accept the authority 
of an uninspired than of an inspired book. We also over- 
look in this doctrine the results of the fundamental fact in 
reason, that of growth. Complete truth can not exist for 
a finite mind, aside from the most simple and primary 
statements ; and large truths can not be lodged in 
language, aside from the variable understanding of those 
who use it. Truths which transcend the writer and the 
reader are as yet unrevealed and unrendered ; they are 
not truths. Reason is the measure and the only measure 
of truth ; when authority enters, it and truth take their 
departure together. 

The historic facts of the Bible have a more than ordi- 
nary historic basis, while in them and over them shines 
the purest spiritual light. They stand like a great char- 
acter, majestic and real, through Its historic force and 
spiritual integrity. 

What, then, is the occasion of this doctrine of inspira- 
tion as something above and beyond reason ? Precisely 
that which has been the occasion of an infallible pope and 
an infallible church ; the reluctance with which men let go 
of authority, and fall back on reason. It was another idol 
set up over against these idols ; another blind movement 
of unreason. Inspiration is the float on which the theo- 
logical engineer builds his superstructure, before he gets 
it in position and is ready to sink it to its true founda- 
tions. It has become in the spiritual world that tradi- 
tional element of menace and fear, which prevents our 
searching the Scriptures through and through, till we pos- 
sess them and are possessed by them. Inspiration pro- 
ceeds on the idea that men are dull, and timid, and wilful, 
and must be brought into ranks and marched in ranks. 



RATIONALITY IN THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 3 1 

marshalled by some single man, or council, or church. 
God alone trusts his creatures with their powers. A stern 
doctrine of inspiration has often been, to the sceptical 
mind, the obdurate shell in whose cracking the kernel of 
truth has been pulverized into dust. From no lips did 
ever a more severe censure fall on the disposition to 
proselyte men than from the lips of Christ, and the very 
essence of proselyting is the substitution of coercive and 
blind incentives for rational ones. If the mind is to be 
left with the truths of the Bible, it must be left with 
them. It is not a question of give and take, but of com- 
prehension simply. Precisely in the measure in which un- 
intelligible elements enter our faith, are we without foot- 
ing in the spiritual world, and are made dependent, we 
know not on w^hat under-current of remote forces. We 
may no more set aside one portion of our divine outfit in 
faculties than another ; no more suspend reason by a doc- 
trine than contradict our senses by a dogma, like that of 
transubstantiation. Our life is one, and must be main- 
tained and ripened in its harmony and freedom. It is 
this fulness and concord of our faculties that Christ comes 
to give us. What we do against reason, we do against 
the completeness of God's work. Not till we have long 
been with Christ will he ask us, But whom say ye that I 
am ? And even then one may speak for a dozen, and 
that one not half understand what he himself says. The 
ultimate problem is to see and to love and to live ; the 
germ is vision, a guidance into all truth. 

It Is to be regretted that a statement of the order just 
made should be regarded as an attack, even an eager and 
acrid attack, on revelation. Its intention is quite the 
reverse. Inspiration, so far as it signifies any communica- 
tion of truth that either in substance or form transcends 



32 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

human apprehension, cannot issue in revelation. Revela- 
tion is the reverse of this, to wit, the perception of the 
truth according to its own nature as the truth. This is a 
simple process, embarrassed only by any thing extraneous 
to it. If we distinguish on the one hand the external 
conditions of the sacred writer, and on the other his 
own insight, the Spirit of Truth present with him, both 
must concur in apprehension. So far as he misses this, he 
misses the truth, both for himself and others. There is 
in this view not the slightest objection to the presence of 
the Divine Spirit, but to the idea that its presence issues 
in something less than insight. Insight, we must insist, 
is the highest product of the Spirit, and that insight is 
insight under the laws of insight, and to be used by other 
minds simply as insight. In the calcium light the com- 
bustion of the two gases owes its brilliancy to the glowing 
lime ; the mind of the inspired writer is the seat of that 
concurrent action whose product is revelation. Any ab- 
normal action confuses revelation itself, and con- 
fuses our use of revelation. What we affirm is, that 
revelation and reason do not miss each other, but that 
they concur at one point, — apprehension, knowledge, 
truth. Revelation is not to displace reason but to aid it, 
and it can only aid it by coming freely under its law. If 
it sets up another law, it brings embarrassment and con- 
flict. The inspiration of the Almighty giveth — what ? — 
understanding. 

It may be a matter of surprise that those who most 
freely use reason often strive most determinedly to re- 
strain its use in others ; that they put down reason with 
reason. This action, if closely analyzed, seems to arise 
not so much from a distrust of reason, as from a mistaken 
trust in it. These persons imagine that the processes of 



RATIONALITY IN THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 33 

reason are more obvious and certain than they really are ; 
and that appropriate emotions and actions flow from them 
almost by necessity. They thus think it right to require 
of others their own convictions. A Calvin identifies in- 
tegrity in conduct and lucidity in thought, and makes his 
own action a standard of both. What is wanted under 
these circumstances is not less reason, but more reason ; 
not less confidence in reason, but a wiser confidence in it. 
The logical process, which is only the central line of move- 
ment in thought, is often taken for the whole broad stream 
of knowledge. All the outlying parts of the broken and 
extended river determine its current, and so do all the 
emotional experiences of the man define for him his lines 
of conviction. Yet, as in the obscure flow of the river 
there prevails but one force — that of gravitation, so in the 
more complicated movements of mind there is but one 
law — that of reason. We cannot admit this law fully, 
save as we fully admit its condition, which is freedom. 
Experience is God's teacher for men, and it belongs to us 
to offer only a modest assistance in the schooling of the 
world. 

Says that honored man. Professor Austin Phelps, in a 
discussion of future retribution : " The doctrine has an 
intense severity which is abhorrent to some of the pro- 
foundest instincts of our nature. The glare of it scorches 
the natural eye. We instinctively turn from it with con- 
sternation." There is no natural eye which is not meant 
to be an organ of vision, and which, rightly used, is not an 
organ of vision. There is no antithesis more fatal than 
one between our powers and God's revelation to those 
powers. The power and the revelation must forever meet 
in one result — truth. A conflict of the sort here implied is 
simply chaos in the spiritual universe, and the convulsions 



34 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

of thought must proceed freely till order and peace reign. 
We may wait on the future for knowledge, we may strug- 
gle for it now ; one thing we may not do : affirm disorder 
to be order, and the frozen waves of our own ruffled 
thoughts to be the rock of truth. That which repels 
our profoundest feelings is not yet understood by us ; 
that which is confusion is not the divine problem 
solved ; that which is inchoate is not creation. If 
there is any one thing notable in the words of Christ, 
it is a simple, direct, ever-returning appeal to reason. The 
truths of reason may at times be too profound for us, but 
we may be sure that they are there, and that when they 
are disclosed they will lie serenely in the light, Hke all that 
have gone before them. 



CHAPTER III. 

Spirituality in the Words of Christ. 

The word idea Is employed in its most general sense 
to express any intellectual state. One of the most ob- 
servable and remarkable facts in the life of man is the 
degree in which he is governed by certain ideas, which 
constantly return to him. These ideas involve a circuit 
of feelings which support them, and are strengthened by 
a daily experience ordered under them. The ideas which 
rule different classes of minds have very different forms 
and very different degrees of extension. They may 
belong to a certain grade of civilization ; they may per- 
tain to a nation, or to a community within the nation; 
they may be the product of some one type of religious 
faith ; or connected with some one class or some one pro- 
fession ; or they may be in a measure peculiar to an 
individual. The ideas which govern a miser are of this 
last order. 

Ruling ideas are, however, greatly aided by the con- 
currence of many minds in them, and the precise phase 
of the spiritual forces dominant in any individual is a 
composite result of the interior tendencies and the 
exterior influences that have been joined together in the 
formation of these ever-returning ideas. A dominant 
conception of the things desirable, no matter of how little 
worth the things themselves may be, and of the method 
of their attainment, is a spiritual fact, and marks a spir- 
itual government in every man. Even the savage is not 

35 



36 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

left wholly to his appetites. He begins to form opinions 
and to feel the constraint of opinions, and every step in 
civilization involves an increased transfer of ruling forces 
from the appetites which possess the body to the ideas 
which possess the mind. These ideas admit of but slow 
modification, and though occasionally set aside, are sure 
to return again in continuous action. They express the 
balance of convictions and feelings that has gotten hold 
of the mind ; they acquire the force of habit, and increas- 
ingly exclude all opposed and foreign considerations. 
The ignorant and savage mind is not relieved from the 
government of ideas by the narrowness of its ideas ; they 
are only the more irresistible by virtue of this fact. A 
stupid superstition is more difficult to displace than a 
more rational conviction. 

There is something marvelous in the energy with which 
one type of thought comes to prevail in a church. Every 
one is challenged at the outer gate, and no one finds 
admission who has not the watchwords of the place. 
Once admitted, every mind is acted en in the same way ; 
conventional influences concur with primitive tendencies 
in stamping deeper and deeper the prevalent ideas. A 
more or less distinct sense of opposition between churches 
serves to check the transfer of alien impressions, that 
might otherwise modify the ruling conceptions. Species 
are in this way formed in the intellectual and spiritual 
world, and their types are as carefully guarded against 
change as in the vegetable or in the animal kingdom. 

Men are thus everywhere governed by ideas, with their 
affiliated feelings, which have in one way or another won 
possession of the mind, and whose present power is very 
little affected by any want of rational grounds in their past 
growth. These ideas are an existing dynasty, whose 



SPIRITUALITY IN THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 37 

authority is not overthrown by a simple denial of its 
legitimacy. The rank and file of an army may have every 
reason to revolt ; physical strength is wholly on their side : 
yet there may be such a bondage of traditional ideas 
among them that a few officers are able to rule them in a 
most tyrannical way. When they do revolt successfully, 
it is under some new phase of a prevailing idea. An 
article recently appeared in the Nineteenth Century, writ- 
ten by one in the military service of Austria. It endeav- 
ored to show that England, made negligent by her insular 
position, has overlooked the rapid progress of the past 
few years in military science on the Continent, and, as a 
consequence, is utterly unable by force of arms to protect 
herself and her possessions from invasion. The simple, 
undiluted military idea of force, as the only defence of 
society, was applied throughout the article with the most 
depressing effect. It seemed impressed on the mind of 
the author that each European nation stands on a precipi- 
tous incline, and can maintain its position only by untiring 
and watchful exertion. Force settles all things, and must 
soon settle them to the disadvantage of the weak. The 
relation of Canada to the United States was adduced 
among many other examples of weakness in the British 
Empire. The assertion was that it would be easy for the 
United States at any time to occupy that province. The 
implication of the military idea was, that we were likely, 
at any time, to enter on so promising an undertaking 
with corresponding gain to ourselves and loss to England ; 
that the notion of conquest was sure at some time to take 
possession of us, and that the possibility of defeat ought 
to be immediately present to the English mind. 

The ideas of commercial advantage, of justice, of social 
well-being and good-will, which are becoming every day 



38 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

more and more effective forces in the relations of these 
two countries, and already quite outweigh the military 
sentiment, seemed, in the conception of the writer, to sink 
out of sight in the presence of the impulse of military 
honor, and the delight of its gratification. The problem 
was discussed as if the people of the United States were a 
kind of predatory tiger, lying in wait for the favorable 
moment to make a spring ; as if no gratification in the 
long run could be greater with them than that of inflict- 
ing injury under the general notion of national honor. 
The article was a startling disclosure of the presence of a 
thoroughly cultivated and widely influential class in so- 
ciety, governed by ideas as rude and barbaric as those of 
Genghis Khan. 

That the military idea still remains deeply rooted in 
Europe is only too true, and its retrogressive and destruc- 
tive character is vividly shown when the great English 
nation, under a stern array of facts, is exhorted to turn 
aside from its many undertakings at the ends of the world, 
and adequately arm itself against the Christian nations of 
Europe. If nations stand on such an incline as this, not 
only is it precipitous, it is made more so by each new effort 
at adjustment. Preparation for war is no protection against 
war, for the preparation is universal ; and after each effort 
all resume the old relations with added strain and danger. 
The possibility of escaping such ideas as these, and put- 
ting in their place more enlightened and beneficent ones, 
is the possibility of progess. But men are ruled by ideas ; 
the military impulse is but an idea ; and they may there- 
fore be ruled by increasingly noble and just ideas. If the 
convictions and feelings incident to good-will can be made 
forceful in their thoughts, all external expressions will con- 
form to them and confirm them with wonderful rapidity. 



SPIRITUALITY IN THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 39 

Here, then, in ideas is the truly constructive centre of 
human society. He only builds for the future, who 
establishes, intensifies, and purifies the appropriate ideas. 

Every one who is gifted with a philanthropic temper 
understands this, and is struggling for the government, in 
his own mind and in the minds of others, of those ideas 
which are able to reconstruct and bear forward human 
life. Men are possessed and controlled by ideas, and so 
the fitness, breadth, and beneficence of these ideas become 
the one comprehensive and significant fact. 

Fine art is a question of ideas and forms ; a question, 
therefore, of the spirit and the letter. Genius in art 
flashes out on the side of the idea. All constructive spir- 
itual forces in the spiritual world show themselves as spirit, 
the spirit that maketh alive. Yet we know how inseparable 
are the two elements, spirit and form. While the letter 
may kill the spirit, it is none the less the letter that the 
spirit makes alive. While the dead letter is all that is left 
when the spirit sinks out of sight, it is the living letter 
that is present when the spirit rises into light. The spirit 
has no effective force save under the form that the letter 
gives it. 

Any spiritual movement is at once disclosed, therefore, 
in its character by its treatment of forms and ideas. A 
true movement approaches forms only through ideas, and 
carries forward ideas at once into appropriate forms. 
Herein the method of Christ is preeminent. He is spirit- 
ual ; he deals directly with ideas. Yet he pushes every 
idea into action, and treats every action under its own 
idea. Such a position, consistently taken, is the only 
universal one, and the only one universally effective. 

This spiritual method starts with the individual and 
not with society. The primary factor is the individual. 



40 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

Only as the individual first makes society, does society 
react on and make the individual. Christ commences 
with the earliest germs of our composite life in the spirit 
of man. The relation of the forms of religion — even the 
wisest and the most direct — In the discipline of man, is 
clearly put in the declaration : The Sabbath is made for 
man and not man for the Sabbath. Christ came eating 
and drinking, and so taught his disciples that the religious 
life lies even more in the wise use of liberty than in its 
wise renunciation. This is a truth which the early Church 
lost sight of, and which the Church, even down to our own 
time, has especially misapprehended. Men have striven 
to save the spiritual, as a dethroned king is saved, by 
flight, rather than to win for it its true sovereignty over 
physical things, intellectual powers, and social conditions. 
Our Saviour declares that the pure in heart shall see 
God. We lose the full force of the words by interpreting 
them as if some Visible Presence were referred to, purity 
of heart being a condition of admission to it. Is not the 
idea rather that a pure heart is a primary medium of 
vision, by means of which the soul is made cognizant of 
the Pervasive Spiritual Presence about us ? The doctrine 
of a spiritual life, complete within itself by virtue of its 
own clear and controlling conceptions, is nowhere more 
distinctly put than in the words of Christ to Nicodemus : 
Ye must be born again. The habitual ideas of a compara- 
tively upright mind Avere brushed away by the assertion, 
as quite inadequate to lead up to a new life, for the life in 
Christ was emphatically to be a new life. The mind must 
be born into a realm of new ideas ; must be born again. 
What these ideas are, is brought before us in the Lord's 
Prayer: Our Father who art in Heaven. Hallowed be 
thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in 



SPIRITUALITY IN THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 41 

earth as in heaven. They are the fatherhood of God, and 
the coming of a social state in which this fatherhood shall 
find full expression. Certainly none will deny that these 
ideas, comprehensively understood and passionately re- 
ceived, would be able to beget and nourish a life of such 
scope and felicity, that we have as yet only caught remote 
glimpses of it. This life would be a pure spiritual life, as 
it would be habitually maintained by the highest spiritual 
conceptions. In proportion as this idea of a Pervasive 
Presence of Love in the world, and of its power to recon- 
struct all things for itself, holds the thoughts and calls 
out the affections of men, are the conditions present for a 
spiritual kingdom. 

Social progress, therefore, is as spiritual in its ultimate 
terms as is individual growth. There is no union of men, 
save through the affections ; and there is no harmony 
of the affections, save as they are gathered by one 
comprehensive idea under one law. If there is no 
supreme idea, no common and supreme relation present 
to men's minds, there can be no synthesis in thought or 
action. With or without theism, the spiritual kingdom 
must be built by a supreme faith and conviction of some 
sort. It must first find a centre in men's minds, that it 
may later find it in their lives. The simple desirability of 
union is not the basis of union, this must be found in the 
living convictions which can sustain it. If love is not the 
rational basis and frame-work of the universe under its 
truest conception, no effort to make it so on the part of 
men can prosper. We cannot love men, save as we are 
bound to them under rational ideas, whose natural product 
is love. The particular cannot rule the general. The 
general must call out and sustain the particular. We 
may wish each philanthropist all possible success in bind- 



42 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

ing men together, but the fundamental condition of suc- 
cess remains a coherent idea whose direct issue is the law 
of love, the law which Christ put in the foreground as the 
command : Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind. It is 
out of spiritual ideas that spiritual life proceeds ; out of 
the life of God that our life flows ; in his life that our 
lives move and have their being. Without the sustaining 
idea of a Supreme Rational Presence in the world, pure 
and pervasive love finds no sufficient support. " Certain 
it is that the new epoch will not conquer unless it be 
under the banner of a great idea, which sweeps away 
egoism, and sets human progress in human fellowship, 
as a new aim, in place of restless toil, which looks only 
to personal gain." ^ 

Two limitations crowd on the spiritual development of 
man. Perfect love is not applicable, save between perfect 
beings. The ignorance, debasement, and vice of men put 
corresponding restraints on trust and affection between 
them. Rational love can not lose sight of excellence, and 
is ultimately for excellence. We are to love our neighbor 
as we love ourselves ; and we cannot love our own lives, 
save as they are seen to move toward a comprehensive 
and permanent ideal. The law of love, then, can find in- 
cipient action only as a spiritual idea of each life, and of a 
kingdom uniting all lives, is present to call it forth. If any 
one seeks a " synthesis of humanity," he must not merely 
recognize the two laws of Christ, he must possess, deeply 
implanted in his thoughts, those conceptions which sustain 
these laws, and give them movement in the mind. Love 
for our lives such as they now are, love for our fellow-men 
such as we find them, viewed under the ever-returning 

* " History of Materialism," Lange, vol. 3, p. 361, 



SPIRITUALITY IN THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 43 

condition of deep division and petty strife, can only fol- 
low from some profound truth that is passing into the 
light and carrying all hearts with it. The spiritual wis- 
dom and power of Christ are found in the antecedent 
ideas he holds in his own mind, and plants in the minds 
of others as the germs of life. We are not called on to 
draw our inspiration from a remote ideal, which gains no 
expression in existing facts, but from an over-mastering, 
spiritual Presence, pushing the ideal toward us, and push- 
ing us toward the ideal. When the ugly facts just about us 
block the way, we have not an ideal and a real wrestling 
with each other, but the inner life of the real is seen to 
be moving toward the ideal, and to be at one with it. 

The second limitation is that men never conceive the 
law of love clearly, save in the degree in which they obey 
it. The object of Christian truth is to organize men under 
this law, and yet it is plain that it has accomplished this 
result only very partially, even with those who have ac- 
cepted it. Character is Christian character only as it is 
more lovable than all other character. Yet Christian 
men have not judged their own characters or the charac- 
ters of others in this way. The true standard by which 
to criticise any phase of faith is the human synthesis 
wrought by it, the attractive force of its ultimate units, 
the organic spiritual powers that draw its members to- 
gether, the wisdom and grace of the ideas that rule 
them, the kind of kingdom and the strength of the king- 
dom in which they are coalescing. 

Men seem to think that salvation is an invisible fact of 
some order to be taken on faith. It is rather a supremely 
visible fact, open to the most common and to the most 
scrutinizing observation. It is the fact of a new organic 
force in the individual shown in increased integrity — as 



44 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

inner unity, — and increased love — as outer power. It is a 
fact which we must all feel, therefore, as we approach it ; 
it was the fact that made the early Church so conspicuous. 
The magnet is a magnet because it has the attractive 
power of one. The spirituality of the method of Christ 
is seen in his presentation of appropriate ideas, and in his 
reliance on the continuous extension of these ideas within 
themselves. Nor are they ideas which rest in the mind 
of man simply ; they gather up rather the whole force of 
the spiritual universe, and bring it to w^ork with the mind of 
man. Man aids in a work of which he is by no means the 
author. He is not called on to make a kingdom, but to 
learn to play his part in a kingdom that is in the processes 
of construction. 

The significance of the great increase of emphasis laid 
by Christ on the passive virtues, meekness, patience, for- 
giveness, as contrasted with the active virtues, courage, 
self-assertion, justice, is apparent in this connection. We 
no sooner forecast the future broadly, we no sooner come 
under the government of an omnipresent constructive idea, 
than we find occasion for patience, that we may not be 
unduly fretted by delay ; for forgiveness, that we may cut 
short none of the forces which work for success ; for meek- 
ness, that we ourselves may enter with a chastened 
and obedient spirit into this kingdom of harmony and 
love. The passive virtues are called out by the presence 
of overshadowing ideas, and they help, as a gentle provi- 
dence, to nourish all the spiritual powers of every human 
soul. Though our Lord was in no degree destitute of the 
bold, active virtues, his unusual lustre of character was 
found in the passive virtues, his power to rebuke adverse 
influences by waiting on their natural correctives. The 
active virtues are to the passive ones what rashness is to 



SPIRITUALITY IN THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 45 

wisdom, what boldness is to love ; they hold but a small 
portion of that moulding power by which great events are 
slowly nourished into life. A main point in the Kingdom 
of Heaven is how to escape the weakness of its inception, 
how to reduce the first strain of its imperfections, how to 
teach the strong to bear the burdens of the weak. The 
active virtues make haste to overcome evil, but they expect 
to do it with evil ; the passive virtues are content to abide 
by the slow remedial measures of the good itself. A 
supreme spiritual idea, brooding over all impulses, begins 
at once to call out the passive virtues, and to hold in 
check the active ones, — to become a creative spirit. 

The Churches which have sprung up out of the life of 
Christ have especially fallen off from his spirituality. 
This has been due to the disproportioned force of forms 
and of visible things over the minds of men. The spir- 
itual life must renew itself many times and in many ways 
before it can win its own. A Church has fitness only as it 
gives the best immediate discipline. It stands in no closer 
relation to the Kingdom of Heaven than any one 
university to the world of letters. The universal, his- 
torical Church, if we attempt to mean thereby any thing 
more than the unity of the Kingdom of Heaven foreshad- 
owed in the pure thoughts of pure men, is a misleading 
fancy, the scope of whose import is sought in external 
facts, not in internal life. No matter in what Church- 
fellowship our Lord may be found, his language will still 
be : I have sheep which are not of this fold. 

If we look upon the Kingdom of Heaven as that com- 
plete spiritual life which is to prevail on the earth, we 
cannot say that its centre is to be found in any existing 
organization, that its progress will necessarily reduce 
these organizations to any one type, or that they will act 



46 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

othenvise than as movable centres ready to be thrown 
into higher relations with each other, as the rhythmic 
movement takes more complete possession of them. It 
is not the purpose of spiritual unity to abolish individual 
diversities, but to hold them in more immediate ministra- 
tion to each other. Our only safe assertion is, that as the 
inner force of spiritual life increases, it will take the place 
of the unity of external methods and rites, and these, 
both as divisive and unitive agencies, will be reduced to 
their lowest terms. The coherence of all spiritual life in 
successive ages and in diverse persons and places, is an 
idea that cannot receive too much emphasis, because it is 
that inner organizing idea which watches over its own ful- 
filment. But this is a fact which, far from demanding any 
immediate expression, or perchance any expression, in 
external organization, is rather present to our thoughts for 
the very purpose of reducing the conflict between existing 
Churches and existing tendencies, and giving an inner 
ground of union only the more apparent by virtue of the 
diversities of persons, times, and places. It is not oneness 
but unity, not sameness but harmony, not constraint but 
liberty, not quiescence but movement, that are sought for. 
The equilibrium of the Kingdom of Heaven is a dynamical, 
movable one; its centre masters all subordinate centres 
by their activity and its own activity. We can only rise 
to a Church universal by rising quite above any one 
Church, and yet by not losing any Church in its own 
sphere. 

The spirituality of the idea which Christ bore with him, 
and strove to implant in its pure form and with its appro- 
priate governing forces in the minds of his disciples, is 
especially manifest in his presentation of his relation to 
God on the one hand, and to his followers on the other. 



SPIRITUALITY IN THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 47 

When Philip said to him, in those last hours of com- 
munion in which the eleven were seeking, and yet how 
blindly, for the guiding ideas of truth : Lord, show us the 
Father and it sufhces us, Jesus said unto him : Have I 
been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known 
me, Philip ? He that hath seen me hath seen the Father, 
and how sayest thou then show us the Father? Here 
was an outcry of the senses. Philip would fain see the 
truth. He longed for an open door by which he could 
enter bodily into the kingdom. 

The words of Christ wholly set aside the notion that 
the Kingdom of Heaven is to turn, or can be made to turn, 
on any new visible effects ; that any further revelation was 
at present possible. An Invisible Presence was already 
present in visible things, and must be found there, or not 
found at all. The supreme idea, that of a Heavenly 
Father, had expressed itself in Christ ; had been worded 
forth again and again by Christ. That idea, in its own spirit- 
ual order, must take possession of the minds of his dis- 
ciples, and rule them. Otherwise Christ had spent three 
years with them to no purpose. This clinging of the 
minds of men to a sensible manifestation, is like that 
which binds timid birds to the nest, or inexperienced 
swimmers to the shore. This spiritual lesson had a re- 
hearsal in Peter. He was bold enough to venture on the 
water, but not bold enough to walk on it. Christ was an 
open door to his disciples, by which they entered the 
world of spiritual ideas ; saw them as he saw them, and 
felt them as he felt them. 

The same relation is taught in another form, when he 
assures his disciples that it is expedient for them that 
he should go hence, but that he will pray the Father, and 
he shall give them another Comforter, that he may abide 



48 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

with them forever, even the Spirit of Truth. Every 
supernatural manifestation, every special revelation, is to 
be regarded as an effort to help forward weak and imma- 
ture minds onto a truly spiritual footing. The physical 
presence of Christ came to occupy too exclusively the 
senses of his disciples, and so got in the way of his words. 
It displaced that inner vision of truth, which was the real 
revelation of God. It became needful, therefore, that 
their training should be altered, that they should be led 
to a deeper, stronger, more self-reliant grasp of the truth 
by the very Spirit of Truth. 

The bold figure in which Christ asserts that his disciples 
are to eat his flesh and drink his blood, is but a striking 
way of insisting on the fact that they must become full 
partakers of his ideas, and so of his life. The grossness of 
the image was fitted to save the mind from any literal use 
of it, and the force of the image from any misapprehension 
of it. Yet the truth was not quite won, nor the error 
quite escaped, and so men traveled by the obscure road 
of transubstantiation and consubstantiation up to the 
light. 

These shreds of thought, which seemed for a long time 
to the disciples but cobwebs floating in the air, visible 
only for short distances, and from particular positions, 
were the living filaments of the new spiritual growth, 
which was to root itself in all minds, transform all hearts, 
and lead men at length to understand that the King- 
dom of Heaven is within them, the plants of righteousness 
having no other soil than the human soul. The proof of 
the Messiahship of Christ is essentially for us what it was 
for his disciples. They were called in one way to trans- 
late the visible into the invisible, and we are called to do 
the same thing in a somewhat different way. Those who 



SPIRITUALITY IN THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 49 

can make the translation will believe in the divine message, 
no matter to what generation they belong ; and those who 
can not make the transfer, share neither the vision nor the 
belief. Historic proof is nothing, and the vision of the 
senses is nothing, save as they are accompanied by the 
insight of the spirit into the spiritual message. The mean- 
ing of the cypher saves the cypher from being meaning- 
less. In the degree in which we see the transcendent force 
of the messacre, will our difficulties about the messenger 
fall away. The highest truth in all departments is self- 
verified. Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast 
thou not known me, Philip ? 

The ease with which the mind dwarfs a truth as yet too 
large for it, is seen in the cunning mechanism of law 
which theology has built up between man and God — a 
mechanism so difficult of management, that neither man 
nor God nor both conjointly can handle it without terrible 
loss. A chief office of Christ is to attain a position in 
which he can bear this loss, and make this needful sacri- 
fice. We search the words of Christ in vain for the 
expression of such a purpose. He is the revelation of 
God, he is a reconciliation of ideas ; he who hath seen him 
hath seen the Father. 

The parable of the prodigal is the most explicit, the 
most beautiful, the most purely spiritual exposition of 
the relation of man to God. It was only necessary that 
the prodigal should come to himself, and so return to the 
Father. The mistake was one of convictions and feelings. 
The elder brother may well stand for the theological 
temper. He felt that more difficulties and delays should 
have been put in the way of the prodigal, that it was not 
fair to the righteous to make so easy the return of the un- 
righteous. Here was a righteousness that had gotten an 



50 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

advantage against the sinner, which it did not quite h*ke 
to yield. 

Men are spiritual in this sense, they are ruled by ideas, 
and the more so as they advance in intellectual life. 
Christ would make them spiritual in this sense, that he 
would put them under the government of the truest, 
broadest, purest idea, — the idea on which alone the spir- 
itual universe can rest, that of a Supreme Pervasive 
Reason. Reason can no more be malignant than it can 
be negligent, no more be concessive than it can be exact- 
ing, but must struggle for the synthesis of all thoughts 
and all hearts under its own constructive law of love — love 
which is the inner force of reason. It is plain that if such 
an idea can reign in men's minds, it will bring strength, 
harmony, peace ; and that in the degree in which this 
idea is wanting, these also must be wanting. This is the 
secret of Christ and the secret of the Kingdom of 
Heaven. We shall not easily apprehend how great a 
thing this is : that Christ should at once and fully master 
the problem of human life, should offer no false motives, 
should enter on no partial methods, should look forward 
to a spiritual unity of the race, and should bring into the 
foreground the ideas which can alone be productive of it, 
and which must underlie it when it is accomplished. To 
see Christ in this relation and in this attitude is to 
recognize him as the Master of Life, is to know him as 
Philip should have known him. 



CHAPTER IV. 
The Law of Truth. 

The law of truth is the fundamental fact in rational 
life. Truth, as a law, implies the power to inquire into 
things, to understand them, and to conform our action to 
our apprehension of them. To do this is the nature and 
province of reason. Physical events are interlocked with 
mental life, and the two move on together by virtue of 
the law of truth, the power of the mind to understand 
things and so to adapt itself to them, and them to itself. 
All parallelism between the two movements, that of 
physical events and of spiritual activities, is secured and 
maintained by the law of truth. Facts come under the 
government of reason only by comprehension, and reason 
submits itself to facts without injury only by compre- 
hension. The point of contact between the two is 
always this of knowledge, and the fitting line of action is 
always in conformity with the truth. The law of truth is 
as broad as the reason, and nothing that is present to our 
conscious, spiritual life is present under any other con- 
dition. 

We do not at once see how much is involved in this 
law of truth. Truth, as a law, does not imply mere facts 
of any and all sorts, but facts that stand in definite and 
permanent relations to each other and to us. A dis- 
closure to reason is not one to the eye merely, but to the 
mind also. The mind has no part in the revelation till a 
principle of order is discovered. What science really 

51 



52 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

shows, and what it is justly so proud of showing, is that 
this second and greater disclosure to the mind of order is 
as universal as the disclosure to the senses, and that there 
is, therefore, nothing present to us anywhere in the 
Universe as sensitive beings which is not also present to 
us as rational beings. This surprising assertion our 
increasing knowledge is making good every year. Local 
and feeble as seems to be our personal presence, we lay 
down directions of action which the near and the remote, 
the secret and the subtile forces of the world fully sustain, 
and we shape conclusions which far-off events in the 
Universe come forward to support. That is, mind, as a 
comprehending and voluntary power, is in extended har- 
mony with the world as a fixed and unfolding series of 
events ; and the inference is ready to follow, that this har- 
mony of being and reason is universal and complete. 

This certainly is a startling fact, and in some sense puts 
man in possession of the world. This absolute and ex- 
tended harmony between things which do not seem to 
include or involve each other, is the one great fact of the 
Universe. Mind does reflect the Universe, and the Universe 
does reflect mind, and the two are united under the law 
of truth. Either the two have been shaped together by 
mind under one rule of reason, or the two have grown up 
together as correlative facts of the general order ; either 
this harmony is rooted in reason, or reason is rooted in this 
harmony. To take the latter view is to decide in favor of 
the blind, the instinctive, the irrational, as the final con- 
structive term in the Universe, as against the conscious, 
the intelligent, the rational. If we do this consistently, 
the reason with which we close our development will be 
of no higher order than that with which we open it ; the 
apparent concurrence of thoughts and things will still rest 



THE LAW OF TRUTH. 53 

in the nature of things and not of thoughts ; man will be 
but one thing among things. 

When men reflect how absolutely universal the intel- 
ligible is, with what a net-work of relations it embraces 
the world, they are not willing to refer these results to 
blind physical causes, till they have endowed these causes 
with some of the attributes of intelligence. Hence it 
becomes a favorite method with those who regard the idea 
of development as the ultimate explanation of all things, 
to confound the terms in this equation of truth, giving to 
nature the attributes of mind and to mind those of nature. 
They solve this wonderful relation by perverting its facts. 
They start the process by a vigorous setting aside of mind 
in its normal powers, they continue it by a subjection of 
mind to matter, they end it by an obscure transfer of the 
pilfered powers of mind to matter. At every step they 
contradict our rational experience, and close the move- 
ment by locating intelligence in things where its presence 
is least apprehensible, and denying it in a corresponding 
measure to mind where its presence is most apprehensible. 
The controversy seems to resolve itself into the questions : 
Whether what we know as reason, intelligence, has its ulti- 
mate seat in matter or in mind ? Whether its later mani- 
festations in mind, to which alone our consciousness 
extends, are secondary and incidental, or, in the order of 
reason, are primary and supreme ? or, again, Whether the 
relation of time is the superior relation, or that of reason ? 
If the problem is to be understood, the human mind can- 
not for very long be so untrue to itself as to satisfy itself 
with an explanation that stultifies the explanatory power, 
and abolishes the explanatory process as one of reason. 
Certainly construction, as an instinctive movement of in- 
telligence, is less intelligible than the idea of conscious 



54 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

construction, from which alone we derive our notion of 
intelligence. 

The law of truth, whether it arises from the productive 
force of mind or the productive force of matter, is the 
peculiar law of reason. The two are commensurate. So 
far as they are intelligible relations reason may go, and 
reason can go no farther. As, however, there are such re- 
lations in the entire Universe, reason has the range of the 
Universe. 

Nor is the relation of truth to our emotions less com- 
plete. The feelings have their first and lowest centre in 
the body. They start in sensations which are obscure and 
local — obscure in that they reveal nothing beyond them- 
selves, and local in pertaining immediately to some portion 
of the body. The growth of special senses in animal life 
does not alter the physical character of the feelings, though 
it greatly enlarges their sweep in reference to their sources. 
These obscure sensations of the earlier forms of life carry 
the conditions of action beyond the states of the body. 
In organic life stimuli arise from some change within the 
body. The special senses gather stimuli from a broad 
circle beyond the body, the ear ranging over miles and 
the eye over many miles. The first mastery of space — 
or ordering of action in reference to external objects — 
comes from the special senses. But these alone give no 
government in time. The animal, by its special senses, 
cannot break beyond the charmed moment it may chance 
to occupy. The organic action and the instinctive action 
of the animal have reference to time, but only by virtue 
of the presence of that obscure constructive principle we 
term life, and not by any recognition in consciousness of 
elements that involve time. When sensations are united 
to memory in consciousness, then arise actions with 



THE LAW OF TRUTH. 5$ 

direct reference to time. A consciousness whose terms 
are made up of sensations held fast in memory begins to 
supply incentives from the past for the government of the 
present. From this centre of sensation, an animal experi- 
ence, involving time relations, may slowly creep onward, 
may be coherent within itself, and may give quick and safe 
conditions to action. As the senses are a virtual expan- 
sion in space of the terms of life, so the coherence of these 
sensations in memory gives a kindred extension in time. 

Many are ready to believe that this statement is not 
merely a first statement, looking toward human life, but 
one that covers in outline its entire experience ; and this, 
notwithstanding the great variety of feelings which belong 
to the fully developed man, the vast range of his intellect- 
ual and emotional activity, both in space and in time, and 
the fluctuating and indeterminate character of his spiritual 
incentives, looked upon as sources of coherent action. 
The experience of the brute perfects itself as far as it 
goes. It gives immediate and relatively safe impulses. 
The experience of man lies scattered over an immense 
field, and shows, in reference to it, neither prompt nor safe 
action ; it has but a feeble organizing power. No fair 
philosophy of life will fail to recognize the sudden and 
great expansion in man of the data of action both in space 
and in time, and the accompanying uncertainty and way- 
wardness of movement that characterize him. What is 
the explanation ? 

We believe that the explanation is found in the fact 
that man, by individual and collective experience, is taking 
up a new and higher centre of life. The primary fact in 
this new life is disclosed in the law of truth. The senses 
give us facts ; they do not give us truths. It may indeed 
be said that these facts involve truths, but they involve 



56 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

them only for the reason ; they are not contemplated, in a 
simply sensational experience, as containing truths. All 
that such an experience requires is that they should be 
felt as facts on their sensational side. As facts, they do 
their work directly and rapidly. Nor does a simply con- 
scious and continuous experience, lying about this centre 
of sensation, alter the relation. The records of sensations 
in experience are simply another train of facts, the pro- 
duct of a previous train ; and this second train, by virtue 
o-f memory, acts on the sensibilities precisely as the first 
train acted on them. 

Truth, on the other hand, has to do with facts, not as 
facts, but as the language to the mind of invisible relations 
and principles. The truth-craving temper is no more 
satisfied with sensations than the linguist is satisfied with 
the characters of a language he cannot read. The great 
need of a sensational experience is that it shall respond 
quickly and accurately to the facts so near it in space and 
time as to concern its well-being. This response is secured 
by organic life, by instinctive life, by sensations, memory, 
and the accumulated connections of experience ; and all the 
more exactly because of the narrow range of the activity. 
Truth is no product of an experience of this order, nor is 
it needed in perfecting it. On the other hand, it is sure 
to embarrass it, as double vision may embarrass the eye. 
A printer sets his type more rapidly and correctly if he 
gives no attention to the meaning of that which he com- 
poses. Animal life owes its felicity of action to the nar- 
rowness of the terms it contemplates, and the directness 
of the incentives it feels. 

The power to discern the truth as truth, on the other 
hand, gives the mind at once new conditions, new impulses ; 
starts it from a new centre ; and carries it immensely be- 



THE LAW OF TRUTH. 57 

yond the range and the wants of sensational life. Simply 
seeing the stars does not much expand the world ; but 
understanding them in their nature, position, and relations, 
this gives the mind such a shock of heat and light as turns 
a solid into a gas. This notion of truth immediately con- 
fers a new centre of action, a new arrangement of experi- 
ence around that centre, and calls for an immense 
accumulation of the results of this experience. Not only 
does truth, by its extent and coherence, lead the mind to 
transcend immeasurably the limits of sensation, but what 
it so gathers it reunites to sensation only in a limited 
degree. The truth satisfies the mind as itself a primary 
reward of pursuit, and the conformity of the thoughts to 
it, their commensuration with it, become a delight. A 
new set of feelings, sustaining this new movement, spring 
up from it, and thus the mind becomes rooted in an in- 
tellectual soil and grows there. To be sure, it has not 
lost its former physical connections, but it has thrown 
them into new relations around a higher centre. It feels 
no compulsion, sooner or later, to bring back its gains to 
animal life, but weighs its animal life by its ministration 
to this new w^ealth. 

On the other hand, the power to understand the truth, 
the power of reason to take to itself the range of the 
Universe along the invisible lines of thought, includes the 
powder of reason to direct its own inquiries, and to govern 
its action in a new way — to wit, by the truth. Thus an 
intellectual product intellectually apprehended comes to 
be the law of an intellectual life, more and more coherent 
within itself, and knitting itself together with the accu- 
mulated insight and varied emotional experience of the 
human race. Human life is no longer merely conscious, 
combining facts as it finds them in a narrow experience ; 



58 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

it is Spontaneously active toward the truth, and the truth 
guides it in a career of spiritual construction. This is 
what we mean by spiritual life — a life that is constructed 
about the centre of truth, under the law which truth 
brings to rational action, and sustained by the affections 
which the truth calls out between man and man, man and 
God. This involves the constant exercise of will, and 
will finds its office in bending action to the pursuit of 
truth and obedience to the truth. This conformity is 
virtue, and the failure to conform is vice. 

Instead, therefore, of the return of the rational mind to 
its starting-point in sensation, it strives more and more to 
transfer all its possessions to its new position. New and 
enlarged offices are assigned the senses, and the facts of 
the senses accrue not merely to the benefit of the animal 
life, but still more to that of the spiritual life. 

But the intellect can never be far or long in advance of 
the feelings, and the development of the new life lies 
chiefly in enlarging and deepening the affections, in 
making them the conditions of new insight, and in put- 
ting them in association w^ith the lower feelings without 
the loss of their own character. The law of truth, though 
first a law of thought, is equally a law of feeling, and it 
becomes both to our thoughts and feelings an harmonious 
law only by a steady unfolding along the lines of volun- 
tary action. 

From this view of the philosophy of our spiritual life, 
there follows at once the recognition in it of an inex- 
haustible potentiality. Truth is coherent and complete 
within the Universe about us. Its principles also ap- 
proach our powers and subject themselves both to our 
ability to comprehend them and our power to obey them. 
We can, therefore, assign no limit to the degree of service 



THE LAW OF TRUTH. 59 

that may ultimately be rendered us by the world about 
us. The inner potentiality of this law is still greater. 
Obedience moulds the mind that obeys. When obedience 
is measurably complete, both in the individual and in 
society ; when it passes freely its accumulated gains from 
generation to generation, there will be no restraints in 
those inner transformations wrought by the law of truth. 
The grand principles and powers of the spiritual world 
can pour themselves freely out in human society, as the 
musical conception of a Mendelssohn rolls on in a 
sacred oratorio. In this direction every thing is pliant, 
every thing possible. Intelligent obedience is all that is 
wanting. 

But great potentialities involve great liabilities, and 
spiritual life is in its development marked by failure and 
delay. We can not put an immense distance between the 
starting-point and the goal for one purpose and in one 
relation, and not find it there in other relations also. The 
greatness of the thing to be attained involves a corre- 
sponding variety in the means employed and length of 
time in their use. Nor can this spiritual consummation 
remain one of growth under spiritual powers without being 
open to the chances of vacillating and recessive movements. 
While liberty is not chance, it greatly increases the range 
of accidents. While a rational liberty is being achieved and 
brought under its own laws, it is only partially obedient 
to lower laws. The first fruit of freedom is a re- 
laxation of law ; the full resumption of law is its last 
result. Those who deny liberty in man should none the 
less see that he is the least well governed of all animals, 
and that his actions are constantly escaping into lawless- 
ness, so far as any higher ends are concerned. This 
obvious weakness at the point at which the perfection of 



6o THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

the workmanship should be greatest, finds correction and 
compensation to the eye of reason only by the introduc- 
tion of a new voluntary law, which, once established in 
clear intellectual light, will yield greater flexibility than any 
physical law, equal certainty, and nobler construction. 
Perfection of adjustment, combined with certainty, belongs 
to reason ; this only satisfies reason. But reason has its 
own laws of development, its own conditions of introduc- 
tion and action ; and an interregnum in the steps of evo- 
lution between laws so diverse as those of organic life and 
those of spiritual life is necessarily one of grave perplexi- 
ties and manifest evils» Men dash at conclusions much at 
random. They glorify reason, they admire its fruits, yet 
they complain bitterly of the delays it involves, and 
censure thoughtlessly its necessary conditions. The 
slow growth of insight, the slight gains of experience, the 
dilatory transfer of just convictions into social sentiments, 
the tardy improvement of the birth-right passing by inheri- 
tance, the clearer visions and the better promises that from 
time to time go before the race, these things are over- 
looked in their full significance, and men fret at delay as 
if a spiritual kingdom were so easy a construction that it 
should go forward at once to the sound of music. Let the 
insight of reason be broad and profound, and its conclu- 
sions consistent with themselves, and the difficulties now 
so readily discoverable in the circumstances of our lives will 
be greatly reduced, if they do not wholly disappear. As 
long as we wish ends without means, as long as we feel 
that good can be conferred upon us with little reference 
to our own actions and characters, or that these characters 
themselves are capable of rapid and outward change, so 
long the spiritual universe can not stand in our thoughts 
over against the physical universe, its counterpart, and more 



THE LAW OF TRUTH. 6l 

than its counterpart, in the slow, continuous, and beauti- 
ful extension of order. Nothing, indeed, reminds us more 
distinctly of the necessity of the bitter discipline of life 
than an eager, querulous spirit of appropriation, ready to 
destroy, in reference to all high spiritual uses, the very 
resources it lays hold of. The most exacting members of 
the household, those most hasty to be blest, are those least 
able to be blest. The dulness that obscures the difficul- 
ties of progress, greatly adds to them. 

Reason, calm, clear, and patient, should accept once for 
all spiritual growth as a supreme good, and so accepting it, 
should take with it all its necessary conditions. The eye 
ought not to flinch under the light, nor the reason to turn 
back on itself in its own methods. This idea of growth 
being clearly held, there is very little of the evil of life 
which brings to the mind any new difficulty under it. 
The physical evolution of the world in its tremendous 
sweep, in its slow accumulation of rational terms, is before 
us, in part, for this very reason, that looking far back into 
darkness we may also look far forward into light, and 
bring our narrow and sluggish thoughts up to the great 
theme of an earth and heavens which, in reference to 
those which now are, shall be new. The fact that all other 
explanations of the world finally fail us, notwithstanding 
the trail of light which they may seem for a time to leave 
behind them, shows that they are but the sleeping visions 
of children, disturbed by the weariness and distemper of 
too passionate intellectual activity, and pertain not to the 
quiet convictions of the eternal years and man's waking 
hours. 

These immense possibilities of growth locked up in the 
spiritual world, obscured though they are by so many and 
so stubborn evils, give the conditions of faith. Faith 



62 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

springs from the confidence of reason in reason, from a 
sense of the fitness and certainty of its own universahty. 
Reason admits no limits. Being present it should cover 
all facts ; they should all be reasonable. This affirmation 
reason readily makes to itself. When the mind adds to 
the first assertion, many things are rational, the further 
assertion, many more things are rational than at first 
thought seemed to be, it is ready to leap, by a vigorous 
spiritual induction, to the conclusion : " All that is is 
rational, and every thing that is rational is." This is faith. 
This is the confidence of reason in its own supremacy. 
This is the belief that a Supreme Reason rules all things. 
Faith, therefore, far from containing an irrational element, 
is rather the inner force of reason, pushing beyond the 
narrow light of experience, and conquering for order and 
life the unseen as well as the seen. It is doing in the 
spiritual world exactly what science does in the physical 
world, when from a score of cases it implies a law, and 
from a score of laws affirms the universality of law. It is 
the noble inspiration of an idea which carries the mind in- 
finitely beyond its present position and the vision of 
the senses into the realm of universal truth. When we 
reflect that reason is personal in us, is itself known only 
in and by conscious exercise, we see at once what part 
faith, a trust in Reason, plays in religion. 

Out of these three conditions, immeasurable possi- 
bilities of growth, immeasurable dangers of growth, an 
Omnipresent Reason everywhere yielding truth and 
working for truth, we have the most intense and com- 
plete terms of spiritual life. This presentation involves 
a philosophy ! Certainly ; so does every presentation, and 
we are left to raise the question whether this interpreta- 
tion covers most completely and expresses most fully the 



THE LAW OF TRUTH. 63 

significant facts in the world's spiritual history. That it 
does this in the salient features of that growth which in 
individuals we term character and in nations civilization, 
seems perfectly plain. None of us can set ourselves in 
motion or our neighbors in motion morally without pro- 
ducing for the mind one or all of these incentives — 
possibilities, dangers, aids, All the resolution of the soul 
is born in the moral atmosphere of these motives. The 
record of men who have been morally influential in the 
world is the record of the directions, degrees, and circum- 
stances under which these motives have operated ; and 
the greatest have been those who have felt all three in 
most even balance. Neither individual experience nor 
national history can contradict this assertion. The fatal- 
ism of the Mussulman has in it no conditions of moral 
growth ; the Nirvana of the Buddhist only helps in bring- 
ing to a halt the oldest civilizations of the world ; conquest 
simply expends forces it cannot renew. If any man or 
nation or race begins to take on a spiritual movement, it 
is because in one form or another they have to do with 
the spiritual ideas which issue from the lovers of truth. 
When the Christian Church, which is inseparably inter- 
woven with modern society and modern civilization, has 
made any step forward, it has been done with a definite 
reenforcement of these ideas ;, and when it has lapsed into 
weakness, it has been because these ideas, the constituents 
of responsibility and hope, have lost appHcatlon. This is 
only stating what we must all admit, that some measure 
or form of liberty is the accompaniment of growth, that 
repressive forces are crowded back far enough to give 
room for thought and action, room in which spiritual 
energies can find play. 

It matters not for our present purpose that these moral 



64 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

conditions and this moral temper have been Hmited and 
betrayed in a thousand ways by those who have felt them ; 
it none the less remains true, that they are the universal 
conditions of spiritual progress. They are the incentives 
which lie back of the law of truth, and make it rationally 
significant ; great things that may be gained, great things 
that may be lost, and a concurrence of rational life every- 
where with its rational surroundings and in its own 
rational ends. 

Is this law of truth the law that expresses and governs 
the life of Christ, and gives it spiritual power ? We 
should answer this question most decisively in the affirma- 
tive, whether we consider what this life contains, or what 
it excludes. The law was given by Moses, but grace and 
truth came by Jesus Christ. This is the comprehensive 
statement of the evangelist, and one that the narrative of 
the life of Christ everywhere sustains. The one inclusive 
figure which expresses the effect of his words and actions 
on those about him, is that of light — light that in the 
physical world is the counterpart and image of truth 
in the spiritual world. So thoroughly is the fellowship 
of truth the very substance of his character, that it is his 
life that is the light of the world ; and it is the reception 
of this light that enables his disciples to become the sons 
of God. Nor is truth altered in its freedom by its transfer 
to his disciples, as is too often the case in the instructions 
of a master. The disciples were to be in turn the light 
of the world, a city set on a hill that could not be hid. 

This relation of Christ to his disciples receives the 
most succinct statement in the words : I am the way and 
the truth and the life. The truth is central ; the way 
leads to it ; the life springs from it. Obedience gives 
the conditions of a more profound understanding of the 



THE LAW OF TRUTH. 65 

very substance and spirit of Christ's instructions, and this 
new mastery of the truth in broader relations fills the soul 
at once with a fresh inspiration of life. The life is 
awakened by the light, and the miracle of the physical 
world is repeated in the spiritual world : the fountains of 
light overflow with vital impulses. There is no obedience 
in the Kingdom of Christ which does not rest upon truth, 
and which is not in turn productive of truth ; no life which 
does not draw its nourishment from the truth, and any 
and all truths are esculent in this higher consumption. 

For one fully to take this attitude of simple dependence 
on truth in his own experience is rare indeed in human 
history. Not less rare is it to pass on the same principles 
to one's disciples unrestricted. The strong mind so 
easily fears the perversion of a weak one, is so anxious to 
guard itself against misapprehension, and so wishes not 
merely to initiate action, but to control it, to go with it as 
an ever-renewed impulse, that it cannot easily commit its 
own precious truths to the uses of disciples in the same 
unreserved spirit in which it has held them. The law of 
the master and the law of the disciple separate them- 
selves ; what is conviction in the one becomes restriction 
in the other ; what is entire freedom here becomes partial 
bondage there. 

It is an inquiry, therefore, of utmost interest, the way 
and the degree in which Christ put his convictions on his 
disciples. The freedom and trustfulness of his method in 
this respect, if rightfully contemplated, is one of the most 
surprising things in his character — one of the divine things 
in it. No principle is shaped into a dogma, no action into 
a rite, no personal relation into position, no guidance into 
authority, and so transferred in a permanent and portable 
form. The disciples take up the words of Christ and the 



66 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

works of Christ without any of those conditions of organi- 
zation which begin at once to straiten and Hmit the life 
they enclose. The result is that none of those special 
terms on which Christian churches have been constructed 
can be traced in their narrow assertions of authority to 
any thing in the words of Christ. Those words are pro- 
ductive rather of many forms and many methods, and are 
good for them all, in the degree in which they themselves 
enter into the spirit of freedom, wisdom, and love. The 
proof-texts of the theologian can rarely be taken from the 
lips of Christ, and still more rarely without some loss or 
some limitation put upon the spirit of the words. 

This method and this spirit of Christ are so declared as 
to make us feel that the few utterances capable of a nar- 
rower rendering are not to be construed narrowly. He 
that believeth on the son of God is not condemned, but 
he that believeth not is condemned already, because he 
has not believed in the name of the only begotten son of 
God. The belief referred to is no formal acceptance of 
Christ as a Saviour. Christ was slow to ask even of his 
own disciples an opinion on this point. He immediately 
follows the above words with the interpretation : and this 
is the condemnation that light is come into the world, and 
men loved darkness rather than light. No legal form 
or future condemnation is referred to. Christ guards 
himself against this construction by the words: is con- 
demned already. The condemnation lies in that very 
blindness of the eyes to light, of the mind to truth, of 
the heart to love, disclosed by the two facts, the presence 
of Christ and his rejection. 

When baptism is associated with belief as a means of 
salvation, the union is so transient and so unsustained by 
the instructions of Christ, that even if we have his very 



THE LAW OF TRUTH. 6'J 

words, we may well believe that baptism here stands not 
for the ordinance, but for that which the ordinance ex- 
presses : cleansing of the thoughts, affections, and actions. 
A belief that issues in the fruits of belief, a purified spirit, 
shall carry with it salvation. The words of Christ should, 
by virtue of their prevalent power, construe themselves as 
profound, not superficial ; as spiritual, and not formal. 
He who apprehends Christ must do it as he worships God, 
in spirit and in truth. 

Christ left his disciples at his death, as every ordina- 
rily wise man would feel, in a very unprepared and dis- 
organized state, as regards the dangers and the duties 
before them. The only protection and guidance that he 
promises them is that they shall be directed by the Holy 
Spirit, the Spirit of Truth. What does this mean but that 
their own eyes should be opened, and their own minds 
more profoundly and distinctly moved by the presence of 
surrounding facts and remembered instructions, till they 
themselves should see and feel what was fit to be done ! 
Thus their individual spiritual life germinated, burst its 
restraints, and began to grow. What else could be of as 
much worth as this ! What else could take the place of 
this! 

It is not necessary that we should settle what, if any, 
supernatural element is involved in this showing of the 
things of Christ to his disciples by the Spirit of Truth ; it 
is enough, if the whole process resolves itself into appre- 
hension, comprehension, conviction, and so expends itself 
freely in the realm of truth. It is enough, if it is the 
office of the Spirit of Truth to guide the disciples 
of Christ into all truth. What spiritual boldness of 
treatment have we here, to cast out those timid, ignorant, 
callow disciples-*-certainly timid, ignorant, and callow, if 



68 ,, THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

we contrast their powers with the apparent powers called 
for by the work they had to do — on the tempestuous 
times that followed the crucifixion ! Yet it was a method 
in exact keeping with the moral discipline of the world 
to-day, that flings truth as seed broadcast, letting it fall 
where it may, and suffer what fortunes it may, the one 
possibility always present, that it shall somewhere spring 
up and grow according to its own nature and in its own 
power. 

Christ puts but one limitation on this use of truth. We 
are not to cast pearls before swine. This is a limit which 
lies not so much within the natural bounds of truth as 
without them. It is the swinish, not simply the 
antagonistic, temper that is rejected, and the swinish tem- 
per does not apprehend truth as truth. The herd are 
enraged that pearls are not provender, and so turn in 
their fury on the giver. It is against the law of prudence 
to offer truth that cannot bear instruction and may carry 
irritation. So Christ at his trial remained for the most 
part silent amid the blind passions that swayed the multi- 
tude about him. This injunction is simply saying that 
truth is to be used as truth, and not to be thrown away 
heedlessly as if it were not truth. It involves a loving 
and reverential, reservation of truth for its own high ends 
and ofBces. This is the Christ-like method, but as pru- 
dence, quickened by fear, only too easily persuades men 
to withhold the truth that at all endangers them, the 
principle is let pass with a bare mention. Against this 
timidity, which unduly extends the principle, the Avhole 
life of Christ is a protestation. That life had the one 
supreme and supremely noticeable fact in it, that he bore 
the truth everywhere to all classes, undisturbed by the 
conflict awakened by it. 



THE LAW OF TRUTH. 69 

At no point has it been more difficult for the Church to 
apprehend the life of Christ than in its simple, unreserved 
obedience to the truth. Men distrust each other. They 
distrust the wisdom, they distrust the convictions and the 
good-will, of those about them. They wish, therefore, to 
set up safeguards against the ignorance and prejudices 
and waywardness of those who may come after them ; 
they desire to make sure of what they themselves have 
gained. The father cannot easily believe that the son 
may be safely trusted with the same freedom that he 
himself has enjoyed. Men are thus led to thrust their 
conclusions on those about them ; to overlap the lives 
of others with their own lives. The quickening liberty 
of Luther becomes the crippling bondage of his dis- 
ciples. This conviction and this action are not all awry. 
Men are often much what we think them to be. Our 
error lies in our notion of the remedy. This remedy 
must ultimately be more truth, and more freedom, 
therefore, in its use. Freedom cures freedom. Restraint, 
that is first a rule and then a barrier, must ere long be 
broken down. We wish to correct a moral evil by a 
physical, or semi-physical, force. The good we thus do is 
partial and transient ; the evil we fall into is great and 
permanent. The one thing needful, that good part 
which shall not be taken from us, is to sit at the feet of 
Christ ; and till this is attained, the work is not truly 
begun, the law of truth has not found application. What 
more perfect or more painful contrast than that between 
Christ and the fathers of the Inquisition? Yet the In- 
quisition was the logical outcome of accepting truth, yet 
not accepting it under the law of truth — free, rational con- 
viction. If truth could be transferred otherwise than 
spiritually, the methods of the inquisitor are possibly 



70 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

correct, and are to be looked on with interest, like the sur- 
gery of the surgeon. With no breaking in on civil law, 
with a conservative regard for social institutions, Christ 
recognized completely the office of truth and the freedom 
of truth — the truth shall make you free. Men for twenty 
centuries have been slowly, painfully, almost blindly tra- 
cing these footsteps of Christ and advancing a little dis- 
tance in them. Is it not true, exactly true, grandly true, 
Christ is the way ? 

Men are perpetually turning truth into authority. 
Christ turned authority into truth. He taught them as 
one having authority, yet only this authority of the visible 
reasonableness of the thing said. His words hit on and 
held fast by the eternal laws of mind : the laws of spiritual 
life. Men may rebel against this method and spirit of 
Christ, they may wander very far from them, but they must 
return to them again before they can advance. We need 
trouble ourselves but little about the exact phase of critical 
and historical proof of Revelation. The spirit of that 
Revelation has gotten clear expression, and twenty cen- 
turies have shown it to be the divine law of our own 
constitution and of the constitution of society ; the one 
inherent law of the Spiritual Universe. This law was em- 
bodied in the life of Christ, and so he became the one 
Divine Messenger. 

What, then, is the great fact before us in the world but 
this : a protracted effort of the incipient spiritual nature 
of man to shake itself loose from physical and social ob- 
structions, to master its own conditions, to assert itself 
in the purity and priority of its own law of truth, and 
to do this, as it can only be done, in the force and freedom 
of thought. Men start in violence ; they expect to impel 
and to restrain with the ever-ready blow. The word of 



THE LAW OF TRUTH. 7 1 

reason and of persuasion is unuttered or merely uttered. 
Later, when they begin to speak words of counsel and of 
caution, they still think that a true self-assertion requires 
that the blow of enforcement shall follow fast on the pro- 
test : " a word and a blow." Government is grounded in 
these brute instincts. It is long before truth can be left, 
and still longer before it is left, to work its own rational 
way among the thoughts of men, and assert the authority 
which belongs to it. But Christ is from the beginning 
the word, the word of reason, the word of revelation, the 
word of persuasion. He theoretically asserts the law of 
truth ; ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make 
you free : he practically applies and uses it. He set it in 
motion among men, so that ever-returning assertions of it, 
from his time onward, have brought it down to us. On 
the other hand, delay, obscurity, obstruction, arise from 
the various ways in which this law is narrowed and re- 
tarded. As a spiritual law it must assert itself spiritually, 
and so the moral strife lasts, as in itself the best thing that 
remains to us, till the moral life prevails. If we so read 
the world, we read Christ at every sentence into it ; if we 
do not so read it, it sinks back into darkness, till its lessons 
die out for us, one by one, in the on-coming night of 
death. The light breaks out for a moment, we know not 
why ; dazzles us, and is lost again, before we can begin to 
see by means of it. But if we grant truth, the law of 
truth, the Revelation of truth, the victory of truth, this 
light never palls on our astonished vision, but leads us 
from knowledge to knowledge, from glory to glory, even 
as by the Spirit of God. The only transforming power in 
the world is faith, receptivity, exercised toward the power 
that transforms, — the Divine Truth, the fulness of the 
Revelation of righteousness and peace, Christ our Lord. 



CHAPTER V. 

The Law of Love. 

While the physical universe has reached a point of con- 
struction comparatively complete, and presents laws that 
cover its facts with fulness and with a fitness that is at least 
sufficient to carry it steadily onward, the spiritual universe 
is relatively chaotic ; its laws are but partially defined, and 
are constantly disobeyed. We may, indeed, say of the 
laws of spiritual life that they are inherently perfect, but 
that perfection is not discerned by those subject to them, 
nor pursued when discerned. We must still look upon 
these higher laws as ideal states struggling with the un- 
pliant and disobedient materials from which they are to 
be constructed. So true is this that many catch sight of 
no certain lines^of order, no steady energies of growth, no 
sufficient spiritual goal to which all things are tending. 
They are tempted to regard the spiritual universe as an 
accident — and not a fortunate one— of the physical uni- 
verse. Others, a little more hopeful, look upon it as the 
present inchoate term in general development. They sup- 
pose that when the physical forces of the world shall, by 
the conditions which they impose, have reached more fully 
personal and social forces, and given them closer terms of 
action, a development in human life, somewhat akin to 
the movement which has taken place elsew^here, and in 
completion of it, is to be expected. The vista is neither 
a very clear one, nor extended one, nor bright one, but it 
is still a vista. A spiritual universe that is simply the last 

72 



THE LAW OF LOVE. 73 

term in a physical universe necessarily suffers from com- 
parison with that ideal state which has so long hovered 
before the minds of men, and which springs from the 
belief that the spiritual is in some way destined to enclose 
and possess the physical, as the higher uses the lower, and 
not to be a decadent bud upon it. 

To those who entertain this more comprehensive and 
historical hope, the two laws of love : Thou shalt love the 
Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, 
and with all thy mind ; Thou shalt love thy neighbor as 
thyself, offer the outline of order and the germinant 
idea in the new kingdom toward which all things are 
moving, if not hastening. This much would seem to be 
plainly true, that if the facts of the spiritual world in 
themselves, and in their relation to those of the physical 
world, are such as to give the grounds of these two com- 
mands, and their establishment as laws in the progress of 
events, there is the possibility of a perfect spiritual 
kingdom, as much more perfect than the physical one as it 
is in its terms higher than it. Love is the supreme 
pleasure-giving impulse in human life. We use the term 
love as the last stepping-stone of ascent by which to ex- 
press our feelings toward the things that confer enjoy- 
ment upon us, from lower objects to the highest persons 
who minister to our well-being. The highest directions 
of love, the fullest expansion of love, the harmony of love, — 
these are the conditions of a spiritual life, complete within 
itself. The two laws involve this highest direction, fullest 
expansion, and perfect harmony ; and, therefore, their pos- 
sibility as controlling terms in the world is the possibility 
of a Kingdom of Heaven. The first command expresses 
the elevation and expansion of our affections ; the second, 
their expansion and harmony. These two laws being 



74 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

Operative, and physical conditions being conformable to 
the demands made by them, we should have a perfect 
spiritual kingdom, without weakness and without conflict. 
Nor is it too much to say that in the degree in which 
either of these laws fails of realization, in that degree must 
spiritual evolution come short of its mark. We are able 
to see clearly that these are the conditions and the essen- 
tial ones of spiritual construction. 

The first law implies a supreme centre, the second law 
the harmony of all in their relations to it and to each 
other. Neither in kind nor degree is any thing to be 
added to this kingdom of God. It is a great kingdom, 
the very greatest ; it is a free kingdom, the very freest ; 
a harmonious kingdom, even absolutely so. 

The unrest of our time, and of previous times, is plainly 
due to the weakness of spiritually organic forces. Our 
impulses are misdirected and unsatisfactory in their at- 
tainments ; they are accompanied at every step with fatal 
collisions and great losses. Unrest is the result of ill- 
directed and insufficient affections, and of the want of 
harmony in the social world where such affections find 
play. The physical jar that is still present in the world is 
a real factor and a great factor of evil, but is for the most 
part incident to and consequent upon the perpetual and 
pervasive jar of the spiritual world. This is the inherent 
relation of the two ; the first intensifies the second, and 
the second cannot be overcome without at the same time 
overcoming the first with slow elimination. The manifold 
appetites and passions of men, and the manifold discipline 
to which they are subjected, are parts of one system. 
Unrest in human society is simply the fever of the 
patient, partly medicative partly punitive, partly pro- 
ductive of evil and partly remedial of it. The moment 



THE LAW OF LOVE. 75 

these two laws are present in the mind, it has caught 
sight of the goal, to whose attainment all effort and all 
hope may be rationally directed. An idea, complete to 
the eye of reason, is offered to our thoughts, and invites 
our pursuit. 

The command of supreme love toward God can not 
fittingly be laid upon men, except in connection with 
such a disclosure of his character and of his relations to 
us as is fitted to call out and sustain this love. The 
injunction, when made, gains its full scope only as the 
revelation w^hich accompanies it becomes complete. Su- 
preme and permanently restful affections can only spring 
up in the clear light of reason. The greatness of this first 
command is seen in the greatness of that which it implies. 
It is a feeble and ineffectual thing to command love, 
unless its conditions are at the same time supplied. The 
force which is to evoke this great love of man toward 
God is not the word of authority, but that absolute 
rationality, that supreme excellence, that patience of 
power, that overflowing love of God, which remove all 
distrust, all fear, all misapprehension, and render the 
mind able to draw near to God, and to abide, without one 
disturbing thought, in his wisdom and grace. We do not 
owe our greatest debt to Christ for rescuing these two 
commands from the rubbish about them and assigning 
them their true position, but for making that fresh reve- 
lation of God, and of his relations to us, which justifies and 
sustains the precepts. The fatherhood of God, in its 
fullest scope, is the idea which answers to the perfect 
moral law, and gives that law the possibility of fulfilment. 
The spiritual force of the law arises from the increasing light 
of the revelation. The law, though formally stated, was 
not truly announced, till it fell from the lips of Christ. A 



76 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

star had shone out for an instant here and there, and been 
lost again, but now the heavens began to clear and their 
true glory to be seen. In the Jewish code the injunction, 
Thou shalt love thy neighbor, was a companion precept 
with the command, and hate thy enemy ; while the 
supreme love of God, as the national protector, stood con- 
trasted in the thoughts of the Israelite with adoration 
wandering out toward other gods. It was national integ- 
rity rather than spiritual integrity that was uppermost in 
the injunction. 

If Christ had made no additional disclosure of the 
temper of God, if he had not revealed a love potent to 
draw forth our love, these commands w^ould have failed 
both of instruction and of renovating poAver. Indeed 
they have perpetually failed, because of the mean con 
ditions which men have brought to them. The lawyer, 
full of the law as he thought himself, rose up in the face 
of the command, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy 
self, with the question. Who is my neighbor ? evidently 
hoping by some subtile distinction to win back the field of 
daily life to its ordinary impulses. The parable of the 
good Samaritan, with which Christ made answer, is of 
greater moral worth than the command, because it gives 
the command an extension and interpretation not to be 
evaded. The first command, so far as it has the vigor of 
a moral law, is the offspring of that vision of our Heavenly 
Father which discloses him as the centre and source of 
spiritual life, and draws the heart without reserve unto 
him. Such a vision rose only for a moment in any human 
mind prior to Christ, and has been present only in a 
partial, interrupted way since his time. The law, there- 
fore, has struggled for authority, and shown but a small 
part of the organic force which is in it. Yet, as the 



THE LAW OF LOVE. ^'J 

revelation of God gains breadth and depth, it carries the 
law with it, and constructs men's thoughts under it. But 
this movement is very, very far from completion. The 
law can neither be perfectly understood nor fully obeyed 
till the Supreme Moral Life out of which it springs is 
clearly present to men's minds. The eye may see much 
of the light before it can brook the full blaze of noonday, 
and drink in directly the sun's rays. The possibility of 
obedience to the first command, and of the full inflow of 
moral life which accompanies obedience, is the possibility 
of seeing God as he is, in the purity, scope, and intensity 
of his rational love. 

The possibility of that obedience to the second com- 
mand which shall make the flow of our affections toward 
our fellow-men pure and restful, is double. It involves 
first a recognition of the fact that they are by constitution 
the members of one household under one law, harmonious 
in its action ; and secondly, our hearty acceptance of this 
fact, with corresponding desire to secure its complete 
realization. The second command follows from the first 
command. Not till we find God as a father can we love 
him, and not till, standing with our fellow-men, we find 
him as Our Father who art in Heaven, can we feel the 
full flow of the reflex love we owe to them. If there is 
not theoretical unity in the spiritual kingdom ; if men do 
not by constitution belong to one kingdom, then it is vain 
to strive to construct a kingdom out of discordant ma- 
terials by mere authority. No matter how often and in 
how many places obedience may spring up, it must die 
out again, if the soil and the climate of the spiritual world 
are not congenial to it. We first catch sight of this unity 
of men in their common relation to God. Christ bears it 
constantly with him in his instruction. He addresses 



78 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

himself to sinners, to the weary and heavy-laden ; that is, 
to those who seem to stand farthest out in the spiritual 
kingdom, and least to belong to it. He seeks after the 
lost sheep that he may restore it to the one fold under the 
one shepherd. This fact once felt, that the love of God 
is as broad as the rational kingdom, the forces of con- 
struction operating freely in every portion of that king- 
dom, v/e have at once the conditions of hopeful and loving 
labor with men and for men. As a matter of fact, it has 
been by the discernment of this relation almost exclu- 
sively that men have reached the second plane of love. 
They have come down to it from the first plane. They 
have traveled with the light ; they have felt the benign 
purpose of God, and have shared it. 

Frederic Harrison, in a plaintive and pathetic way, ex- 
postulates with men, and strives to push them on toward 
a ''human synthesis," and to marshal them as an army in 
confronting the ills about them. It is a very -unusual 
effort and a despairing effort to save the beauty and prom- 
ise of the second command by one who has lost hold 
of the first command : " Strange that we do not all, day 
and night, incessantly seek for an answer to this of all 
questions the most vital. Is there any thing by which man 
can order his life as a whole ? Is there any thing by which 
our nature can gain its unity ; our race acknowledge its 
brotherhood ? " '' What is there left, I say ; what other 
idea can become the basis of mundane faith but the idea of 
hu7nanity which includes all ? " '* No one of these critics 
has ventured to dispute the great central principle of a 
human synthesis for thought and life, the principle that 
in convergence toward our common humanity we may at 
last find a complete repose for our efforts — peace within 
us, peace among men." ^ What a bursting up and pour- 

^ Ninteenth Century, March, i88l. 



THE LAW OF LOVE. 79 

ing forth of man's moral nature have we here when there 
is so little to unseal its fountains! How far is a human 
synthesis possible aside from faith in God ! 

If the law of love is an inchoate principle in the human 
constitution, — as we believe it to be — it may be found 
there and urged on the attention of men ; but if it is not 
there, human synthesis is a philanthropic illusion which 
can help no one. But if a supreme spiritual synthesis is 
provided for in the constitution of man and society, what 
better or more profound proof can be given for the being 
of God? What can hide or dim this proof to the mind 
that sees the fact, that the germs of peace are all planted 
in the spiritual world ? Nothing can hide it, nothing dim 
it, save some blind incoherent conviction that the same 
Divine Power that implants the moral principle could push 
it forward more rapidly in development, or dispense per- 
chance with development altogether, and make peace and 
good-will on earth, not proclaim them. That is to say, 
men first recognize the excellency of spiritual powers and 
spiritual life, and then become impatient of their necessary 
conditions. They invoke physical forces that may in some 
inexplicable way flood our spiritual powers, lift them up, 
and bear them at once to the goal. Men crave spiritual 
elevation, but they would fain reach it by unspiritual 
means. The mind will not hold fast to reason as reason, 
virtue as virtue. Moving forward in their own way, by 
their own means, to their own ends, they would wish God 
to make what can not be made. 

Yet Frederic Harrison is so far hopeful beyond his 
faith, that, while denying the intelligibility and credibility 
of any supreme law or grace in the world, he desires none 
the less to gather up the shreds of moral order in society, 
to interest men in them, and to weave them together into 



80 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

that most magnificent of all conceivable products, a 
human synthesis. If this is possible, the easier thing 
should also be possible, the recognition of one rational 
purpose as pervasive of the lives of men, everywhere de- 
fining their aims, in every way helping them on to their 
fulfilment. History is an obscure riddle if this is not the 
order of progress in human thought; a divine impulse 
working with human virtue ; human virtue striving to ful- 
fil the purposes of a divine impulse. In spite of the many, 
the manifest, the bitter failures in religion, it has been by 
religious hope, zeal, insight, that men have gone forward. 
The apparent exceptions to this rule are really no excep- 
tions. Frederic Harrison is himself the product of the 
very faith that he has lost. The wine of the gospel has 
indeed come to us in unclean and earthen vessels, but we 
can not be altogether mistaken in its true character. 
Whether a human synthesis can be hoped for in oversight 
of the first command, is the inquiry ; Whether, with a frac- 
tion of the motives hitherto present, we can do the work of 
the world, when these motives in their entirety have borne 
events forward but slowly? 

The second portion of the law of love remains incipient 
for another reason. It is of the nature of the construc- 
tions of reason that they are ideal, and must be pursued 
as ideals ; their implications and involutions are indefi- 
nitely great, and are never exhausted. The law of love 
is operative in society between man and man. Its perfect 
action, therefore, implies a perfect state of society, a 
society whose units respond one and all to this law. So 
thoroughly is the individual life a part of the general life, 
that there can be no perfection in the one without cor- 
responding perfection in the other. The law of love 
can not move under perpetual contradictions and retarda- 



THE LAW OF LOVE. 8 1 

tlons without a loss of ease and fitness, and a reduction 
in its power to bless the hearts that are struggling- to 
receive it. Love does not allow us to overlook the facts 
of life, — a love that does this is blind passion — and de- 
basement, meanness, malignity, not only remain in them- 
selves what they are, but they take on a peculiarly hateful 
aspect, and bring ugly limitations when confronted with 
virtue. Love so placed must feel abhorrence and re- 
pugnance. The affections, therefore, which are taking 
root in minds partially cognizant of the higher law of 
their lives, must, when brought in conflict with the im- 
pure and selfish impulses about them, issue in repulsions 
as well as attractions, divisions as well as unions. 

Farther than this, there is always in the spirit that has 
not yet attained its moral manhood, w^ith whom virtue 
remains a struggle, many partially suppressed passions, 
which are awakened in an evil way by the evil they 
encounter. Evil has a diabolical power in discovering 
and eovking evil. To endure the contradictions of sinners 
is a divine attribute only. This reaction of evil under 
evil in the partially virtuous mind unites with the just 
repugnance of pure love, and mars the moral state. The 
inner balance of virtue is lost, and the painful strife in 
one's own thoughts is renewed, called out afresh, by the 
turbulence of the moral world. The vessel is tossed by 
the sea on which it rides. This is ever the most unfortu- 
nate result of evil : that it so penetrates the mind which 
is setting up defences against it. If no absolute defection 
follows this return of passion to our inner lives, it none 
the less obscures our vision and distresses us in our work. 

But the law of love is also, in an important sense, sus- 
pended by the presence of vice. The vicious person 
can not be treated as the virtuous one. The gentle minis- 



S2 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

trations and pervasive good-will which belong to love are 
no longer applicable. They must be modified in some 
very real, but oftentimes very difficult and obscure, way. 
A feeling of censure and indignation must be present. 
Virtue must show itself belligerent. It may, indeed, be 
said that the reserved energy which belongs to justice in 
its work of restraint and correction is in harmony with 
love, but it is a harmony peculiarly difficult to realize and 
express. The expressions of justice and of indignation 
are not those of love : they are directed toward disobedi- 
ence, not obedience ; sin, not righteousness ; and it calls 
for the highest equipoise of spiritual life to reach without 
ever passing their limits. Pure love is drawn out only 
in the direction of virtue. In human society, therefore, 
we constantly find ourselves in positions in which love is 
not the fitting moral expression. The appropriate moral 
state is thereby made peculiarly difficult, and the needed 
opportunities of the more peaceful affections are lost. 
Thus the life of virtue in the soul is cut down to the con- 
ditions of the life without it. We must respond to that 
which demands response, be it sin or righteousness ; but 
the law of love in its complete form lies between the 
righteous only. 

A further fact looks in the same direction. Not only are 
there these positive repellents to pure love, there is cor- 
responding weakness in its positive impellents. Love can 
not be called out if there be nothing toward which it can 
be directed. We can not love, we ought not to love, the 
impure and the selfish as we love the pure and unselfish, 
and any measure of these qualities is in abatement of the 
higher affection. Love in indiscriminate exercise loses its 
own character, and imparts no superiority of character to 
its objects. Our love toward God is supreme simply 



THE LAW OF LOVE. 83 

because his virtue is perfeet, and we can love our fellow- 
men only as they share, or begin to share, his excellence. 
The purity of the spirit is the only perfect bond of peace. 
We can not, we must not, lose this purity. Any dispro- 
portion between the love and the object of the love 
loosens every rational relation. We are not called on to 
love our neighbor otherwise than we love ourselves, and 
we ought not to love ourselves otherwise than as we are 
pure. Any measure of impurity abates the force of love. 
Moreover, sin always implies and carries with it visual 
obscurity and obliquity. It shortens and perverts the 
sight. It is unable to discern moral facts fully, or trace 
moral results correctly. It is ready on the one side with 
the extenuation of faults, on the other with their exagger- 
ation. As long as sin is in the social system, the facts of 
that system will not be understood. The results neither 
of obedience nor disobedience will be pure results. Every 
thing will be mixed, perplexed, obscure. No one who is 
immersed in this defective social sentiment can be free 
from its perverting moral power. He will be too in- 
dulgent and too severe. He can no more escape these 
conditions of his time than the ship can escape the cur- 
rents that run under its keel. The limitations of our 
intellectual powers and of our moral powers go together, 
and must be escaped together. As the individual can not 
perfect his physical, intellectual, or social constitution 
aside from society, no more can he his moral constitution, 
the most inclusive of them all. Growth here comes by a 
continuous and extended interplay with the spiritual 
world, till, in some sense, every man is a function to every 
other man, and the perfection of the parts is won by the 
perfection of the whole. Our fellow-men must do much 
of our thinking, and must organize the moral forces 



84 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

which are to play upon our Hves, and by which in turn 
our Hves play upon their lives. The higher life of each 
man flows into the community, and flows back to him 
from the community. The health of this circulation is 
the composite health of the human household. 

We see the action of this fact in reference to God. 
The infinite love of God is hidden from us. Why ? Be- 
cause the moral conditions of the world are such as not to 
allow its full manifestation. The light is in the heavens, 
but the sky is gray and sombre with clouds. Trans- 
gression will neither admit of unrestrained disclosures of 
love, nor correctly apprehend the limited ones which its 
own presence occasions. The same is true among men. 
We do not fully discern or freely acknowledge the virtues 
of our fellows. There is the same obscuration here as in 
the higher field. The vapors which hide the sun hide 
men from each other. This is especially seen in the 
irritation which accompanies argument. Few are able to 
allow a better opinion to set aside an inferior one without 
discomfort. The contact of mind with mind, even at the 
point of truth, calls out the heat of colHsion. Supremely 
fortunate as is this action of mind on mind, it has fre- 
quently been one of disastrous passion. Men can not do 
even the good thing well. 

It follows, then, from these reasons : first, that sin is re- 
pellent ; second, that virtuous men still suffer its reactions ; 
third, that it calls for a peculiar and pecuHarly difficult 
moral recognition ; fourth, that it weakens the incentives 
to love ; and, fifth, that it begets a hazy moral atmos- 
phere ; — from these reasons it follows that the law of love 
is a rational ideal, progressively applicable under its own 
application. It indicates the constructive lines in the 
spiritual world, and gains force as these gain extension. 



THE LAW OF LOVE. 85 

This law is not put upon the spirit as something to be in- 
stantly realized ; it is born of reason and must be sustained 
by the fullest reason. If we think of it as a precept simply, 
we shall soon belittle it, reducing it to our present meas- 
ure. Such a method involves an oversight of the ideal 
fulness of the law, and of the endless spiritual unfolding 
which must take place under it. 

At first thought it may seem surprising that the law of 
love in its two branches, present to the minds of men 
for nineteen Christian centuries, should have met with 
so little comprehension and obedience. Indeed, the 
perfection of the law seems to have been hopelessly ob- 
scured by the imperfection of the practice under it. It is 
almost useless to ask what religious organization under- 
stands this law, and strives after obedience, so manifest is 
it that a narrow and antagonistic spirit has prevailed 
among all considerable bodies of men. As civil construc- 
tions, industrial economics, and social customs are still 
grounded in Christian nations in self-interest, so do they 
also express the average action of Christian men. This 
narrowing down of a fundamental ideal truth in the minds 
of men, that it may lie side by side with the meagre re- 
sults that chance to be present in practice, is, from one 
point of view, the height of moral misfortune. If we 
would put to ourselves the moral facts of the world cor- 
rectly, in their grounds of encouragement and discourage- 
ment, we must understand their relation to this primary 
law under which alone harmony and perfection are at- 
tainable. 

Men constantly wish to secure, and hope to secure, by 
rhapsody what can be secured only by reason, in its slow, 
plodding processes. It is at this point that men theoreti- 
cally and practically oftenest fall out with the divine 



S6 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

government. They look to it for aid when they should 
look to themselves, charge upon it the fruits of their own 
actions, and wish to substitute the grace of God for the 
grace of men. This means simply that the fundamental 
methods of reason have not yet taken possession of their 
thoughts, that they have not yet climbed out of a world of 
incoherent indulgencies into one of coherent delights ; out 
of one of gifts into one of powers ; that they have not yet 
learned to live under reason, by reason, for reason. The 
test question in the divine government is: What would 
be the results if this were done? Would the proposed 
method in application justify itself to reason ? 

Spiritual growth is this extension and coherence of our 
rational powers, and the law of love is a formula of 
movement ; as much so as a mathematical formula is the 
summation of the numerous and complicated steps which 
it gathers up. The formula has no value save in re- 
lation to the processes it summarizes, and the law has no 
worth save in connection with the spiritual life it formu- 
lates. It is not the law we want, but the life to which the 
law pertains. 

Love, perfected spiritual love, as a product of growth is 
rooted far back, historically, in self-love. If love is to be 
no foolish and flickering sentiment, but a thoroughly com- 
prehensive and intensely rational feeling, its first term 
must be a keen perception and high valuation of all the 
great pleasures that attach to human life, and these pleas- 
ures can be best learned, where they are most truly experi- 
enced, in ourselves. No one would wish an ascetic to pre- 
scribe his diet, nor a hermit his clothing, nor a dullard his 
reading. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself would 
not cure the verdict they would render. The surrepti- 
tious saint not understanding himself cannot understand 



THE LAW OF LOVE. 87 

another, not guiding himself wisely, he cannot wisely 
guide another. The breadth, intensity, delicacy, balance 
of our own experience are the charts which prepare us to 
direct the experience of others, and so to make the law of 
love as efficacious in their lives as has been self-love in our 
own lives. A man without self-love cannot have love, he 
has no measure for it. The experience of the world in 
the various claims of men's appetites, passions, tastes, af- 
fections is not more various or more difficult of reconcilia- 
tion than is needful in order rightly and fully to interpret 
human nature to itself, to give it a complete inventory of 
the conditions and resources of human happiness, and to 
furnish forth the reason of man with the terms of its own 
activity. One who has no intensity of life at the centre 
of life, — self — can have no intensity at its circumference. If 
love is a law to such a man, there is little or nothing for 
the law to rule. It is not the law alone, but that which 
the law orders that makes strength and beauty. The 
first term in the growth of a rational kingdom of love is 
self-love, bursting out in the fulness of its impulses into a 
thousand forms of selfishness, all waiting for the love that 
is to restrain them, guide them, and transform them. 
This love must enter at the various points of transition, 
and by the various measures of reconstruction, which 
teach and help the masses, and shape them as furnishing 
the only and true body of social life. The development 
of society is by a series of steps, in themselves secondary 
and transitional. Ground must be gained in one direction 
and built upon, before it can be gained in another direc- 
tion. Each application of the law of love between man 
and man, class and class, the people and the state, implies 
a present preparation for a new relation, and no sooner is 
the new method fully established than it prepares the way 



88 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

for a higher one. Every step toward an equahty of rights 
and opportunities successfully taken gives the conditions 
for the further extension of the same principles. This is 
true, however, only as the movement is general, pervading 
society and carrying it onward as a whole. The law of 
love is strictly a social one, and it must be allowed to 
shape to its own ends all the material subject to it. Re- 
tardation and retreat at one point, carry with them 
retardation and retreat at all points. It is impossible for 
the individual, because of this very law of love, to separate 
his own development from that of the community. Class- 
cultivation and class-power only widen the breach be- 
tween classes, set fast limits to love, aad put off the re- 
demption of society. Such a division, if held to, becomes 
an occasion of disruption. The law of love finds its im- 
mediate field in society, is constructive of society both in 
its civil and social relations, and expands in its action as 
society expands. The presence of such a law proclaims 
at once the long line of progress open to the race. He 
who checks social development at any point, in the rela- 
tion of classes, in the organization of the state, in the 
duties of the state, puts himself In conflict Avith this law — 
a law that cannot lie between heart and heart In one rela- 
tion without lying between them in all relations. We can 
not have a state founded In mere justice, and a society 
under It shaped by love* 

To discern, therefore, the points at which and the 
degrees in which the higher law Is Immediately applicable, 
to Introduce It at these points, and press It In these direc- 
tions, become the form of duty under which the indi- 
vidual and the community, in joint development, apply 
the law. This method of progress takes up the problem 
factor by factor, calls for only a partial apprehension of 



THE LAW OF LOVE. 89 

the ultimate result, incorporates good-will piecemeal into 
the civil construction and social spirit, supplements and 
supplants with it the lower ideas of justice and protection, 
and increasingly wins those conditions under which the 
law is fully applicable and the beauty of its results fully 
appreciable. At anyone stage of this movement, it is too 
much to expect, save in connection with a few rarely 
gifted in spiritual powers, that the law of love shall stand 
for any thing more than a kindly administration of per- 
sonal possessions, and of the customs which for the time 
being define society. The opinions of the masses of men 
wait to be modified by those very forces which are to 
reshape society. The law, therefore, grows into the 
thoughts of men as it grows into society, slowly, by 
insensible degrees, and as one indivisible process. Even 
the most advanced ideas of the clearest minds and best 
hearts must remain incomplete, as not able fully to com- 
prehend the complex changes involved in the conditions 
of the growing problem ; and also as found only partially 
applicable in the community, still tardy in offering the 
safe conditions of progress. 

It is of the utmost moment that we see how completely 
a social law this law of love is, and the limitations of 
apprehension and application which accompany it in every 
stage of development, as it slowl}'' penetrates the masses 
of men, remoulds individual character, and reshapes social 
ties. As no class can separate its fortunes from the 
fortunes of the community, neither can any man long 
maintain in a felicitous form any spiritual feelings which 
are not shared by those about him. Truth calls for dis- 
persion and reflection for the ends of vision, as much as 
does light. The law to have the full range of the 
thoughts and feelings must have full range of the facts 



go THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

through the whole extent of the spiritual realm. When 
the facts disclaim it, the thoughts will begin to lose it. 
As a law of organization, also, it demands and implies a 
reciprocal relation of every part under it. 

That delays, mistakes, deficiencies, will accompany the 
development of this law among men is a matter of course ; 
the correction of them is what God and good men are 
about. No accusation has less reason back of it than that 
which charges upon the advocates of a beneficent idea 
the inconsistencies and perversions that arise under it. 
It is given to no man to see the breadth of a great moral 
principle, much less to see the times, places, limits, of its 
fortunate introduction. Every progressive movement is 
slow, tentative, partial, and they are to be praised who join 
in it on these terms of obscurity and confusion. Great 
mistakes are of comparatively little account in ultimate 
results. They bring delay and occasion reactions, but 
they suggest their own corrections, and have their own 
instruction. At all events they are unavoidable, and the 
faith of the faithful spirit is strengthened in overcoming 
them. The keenest and quickest censure should fall on 
those who make mistakes and failures the grounds of 
unbelief and inaction. They constitute the dead material 
which will not let the living power have its way. Some 
sharp pains may attend on the action of vital forces, but 
when the forces themselves become languid, the danger is 
tenfold greater. 

All forms of presentation of the law of love in Christian 
churches have been partial or partially apprehended, 3'et 
the law has found development in connection with them, 
or, perchance, at times in spite of them. The law is not 
altered, nor the rational ideal which it involves lost, by 
this struggle which attends on its fulfilment. The con- 



THE LAW OF LOVE. 9 1 

fusion of thought and feeling which accompanies the intro- 
duction, theoretically and practically, of moral ideas, is far 
greater than that which comes with new theories and new 
methods in science ; as the interests involved are more 
complicated and sensitive, and the moral truth is subject 
not simply to the action of clear and superior minds, but 
of all minds, and that too in their most perverted and self- 
ish movements. 

The spiritual problem of the world is to be understood 
on its own spiritual basis ; and on that basis. What do we 
find ? That Christ clearly announced the law of con- 
struction, the law of love, and gave it its central position 
as a law on whose prevalence all harmony and all well- 
being depend. If obedience under this law is not attain- 
able, moral life has no goal ; if it is attainable, it has an 
absolutely perfect ideal. Christ also restores to the minds 
of men, or reveals to them, those conceptions of God and of 
their relations to him and to each other, which constitute, 
on the one side, the spiritual facts to which alone such a 
law is applicable, and which furnish, on the other, the only 
incentives of action sufficient for the fulfilment of the law. 
The law is not offered as ideal merely, but as the rational 
exposition of existing facts. 

Christ does not stop with this theory of life, nor busy 
himself primarily in directing attention to it. He takes up 
the details of duty, which lie so near his own hand, yet 
so far off from the ideal, and thus initiates life under the 
law. He understands how incomprehensible the law itself 
is to the crude thoughts of men without better facts under 
it, and these facts he gives, and so helps the giving 
forever forward. There thus springs up a spiritual move- 
ment which, with all its delays and failures, has yet 
at every stage brought this law more clearly into the 



92 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

foreground. What other way now remains to us, but this 
same way ? What other name is given under heaven in 
which this work of salvation can be completed ? Evidently, 
whether we acknowledge Christ or not, we must follow in 
his steps, if we seek our own perfection and the perfection 
of men. The needed ideas have been furnished, the 
needed methods initiated, and all that remains to be done 
is to go forward. 

Take the command: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy 
mind, and the parable of the prodigal son, as expounding 
the terms of our relations to God ; take the command : 
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, and the parable 
of the good Samaritan as its working formula; add to 
these the life of Christ as the one immaculate fact in the 
world's history under these laws, and we can hardly fail to 
see how the spiritual problem of the world now stands, 
how far it has been wrought out, and how it remains to be 
finished. 



CHAPTER VI. 

. The Law of Consecration. 

The older discussions in morals, as well as the more 
recent ones, turn on the relation of pleasure to duty. 
The most vigorous and painstaking thought has not yet 
been able to unite the opinions of earnest and reflective 
men on the question, whether the law of conduct is to be 
drawn from our sensibilities, or is to be referred in its 
ultimate authority to a rational fitness of its own, ration- 
ally discerned ; whether this authority is extrinsic to 
reason or intrinsic to it. Man, by virtue of his physical 
organism, has a wide range of sensibilities. These sensi- 
bilities are greatly multiplied by his Intellectual and social 
constitution. It has been claimed by many, from Epi- 
curus onward, that herein we have the foundations of our 
moral constitution. That If these pleasures are widely 
and wisely compared, both over broad surfaces and 
through long periods; If individual and social relations 
are both considered, and also the tendencies which accom- 
pany inheritance, we shall discover therein a sufificient 
law of human action. That there is a law derivable from 
our sensitive organization, and that it is one of great 
moment, none can doubt. The lines of pleasure and 
those of duty, even If we regard duty as containing a 
transcendent element of authority, are Inseparably Inter- 
woven with each other, and are in constant reaction. It 
is this fact, and the further fact that the two laws apply to 
the same field in human life, that have made the discus- 

93 



94 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

slon SO difficult and so obscure. A very important por- 
tion of the facts has been held by each of the two 
contestants, and has in each case been held without a 
sufficient recognition of the correlative facts brought 
forward in the opposed presentation. The grounds de- 
fended have not been false but partial. 

The strict evolutionary idea is of course committed to 
the development of the moral constitution of man from 
his sensitive nature. It is plain that the law of that 
portion of the action of the animal which is most allied to 
conduct is one of pleasure, and it is thence inferred that 
the moral behavior of man is simply an individual and 
social expansion of the same law by greatly enlarged 
powers. This view has never been more confidently 
asserted than at present, and never more wisely sup- 
ported ; yet there remains a large number to whom it is 
utterly distasteful, and that, too, usually, of men of high 
moral development. 

Nor is this fundamental point in morals made depend- 
ent on religious beliefs. The discussion does, indeed, 
easily and naturally draw to either pole of opinion many 
affiliated conclusions, but these inherent connections have 
not been so clearly seen, or generally felt, as to be the 
occasion of much theological bitterness. Theists have not 
uniformly declared themselves in favor of an inherent 
moral law, nor have atheists pronounced always in behalf 
of the law of pleasure. So carefully and cautiously has 
the law of pleasure, personal and altruistic, been applied 
to action, that the practical results reached under it have 
not been very different from, nor less desirable than, those 
which follow from the intuitive law ; indeed, are superior 
to them, unless the latter law is applied with equal discre- 
tion and a correspondingly broad survey of the facts. 



THE LAW OF CONSECRATION. g$ 

Yet, in spite of tliis external approach, the inner spirit in 
the two theories is very different. Nor would they draw 
near each other as closely as they now do did not each 
involve forces logically traceable to the other. The 
pressure of motives which the utilitarian creates, he creates 
in a nature profoundly sensitive to moral impulses. He 
uses a susceptibility quite in advance of his own explana- 
tions. 

Christ, in the law of consecration, has impliedly taken 
position on this fundamental ethical point. He commits 
himself to the primary and independent force of the 
moral law. He that loveth his life shall lose it ; and he 
that hateth his life shall keep it unto life eternal. Christ 
returns to this principle, as a primary one, often and in a 
variety of ways. Whosoever will save his life shall lose 
it ; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the 
gospel's, the same shall save it. In each case there is an 
opposition of a life of pleasure to one of duty, and an 
unconditional subordination of the former to the latter ; 
and yet there is the promise also, that the former shall 
attend on the latter. Seek ye first the kingdom of God 
and his righteousness ; and all these things shall be added 
unto you. The implication is that duty and pleasure, as 
we conceive them, are perpetually falling apart, and the 
injunction is that we are in all instances to pursue duty. 
The mind is helped in many ways to catch sight of moral 
law, and this becomes at once to it an ultimate law by its 
own insight. 

The philosophic view has often been that of the Stoic : 
that pleasures, as they offer themselves to men, are temp- 
tations, and must be encountered in an unconcessive 
spirit. This also has often been the Christian view, de- 
rived from the words and life of Christ, and has easily, 



96 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

though without encouragement from the Master, fallen 
off into asceticism. Pleasures are temptations to men be- 
cause their sensibilities are not constitutionally harmonized, 
and a large portion of them, and that the most important 
part, remains undeveloped. The strongest sensibilities, 
those which are the seats of the most immediate pleasures, 
must often be repressed in order to secure a proper bal- 
ance, even in the passing hours, and much more to secure 
a true equipoise in coming years. Still more are personal 
pleasures, as opposed to the pleasures of others, obtrusive. 
The results on our own happiness of a careful considera- 
tion of the wants of our fellow-men are so remote, so ob- 
scure, so inappreciable by a selfish man, that there does 
not exist, on the theory of pleasure, any sufficient counter- 
poise of motives, when we contemplate our own enjoy 
ments in direct contrast with the enjoyments of others. 
The spiritual view em.bodied in the words of Christ 
finds the danger of life in this very fact, that pleasures 
are so urgent, blind, and partial in their demands, — that 
they spring from a constitution so disordered and incho- 
ate ; and it confronts this danger with the strong claims 
of duty. 

The utilitarian is not insensible to these confused rela- 
tions of our impulses, and though he phrases the facts 
more mildly, he still strives to provide for them. He 
constructs a noble ideal of what man and society may be- 
come, and brings forward their remote pleasures as rational 
counterweights to hasty and sensual indulgence. The 
effort is most laudable, and deserves more success than 
can attend on it when left to its own resources. If we place 
ourselves on the basis of pleasure simply, then each set of 
sensibilities as they exist in each of us, no matter what 
their present excesses or deficiencies, must define pleasure 



THE LAW OF CONSECRATION. 97 

for us, and become our present standard of measurement 
in all contrasts between enjoyments, whether those of the 
appetites or of the affections ; whether those of the pres- 
ent or of the future ; whether those of ourselves or those of 
society. But it is impossible for a debased nature to form 
a clear and noble ideal ; still less is it possible for such a 
nature to enforce on itself the evanescent and faint motives 
which accompany such an ideal. Yet such a nature de- 
mands these motives at their maximum power, while it 
furnishes them at their minimum power. Its means of re- 
sistance are in inverse ratio to its dangers. The ideal is 
most obscure when most needed, and moral forces vanish 
in the very presence of the work to be done by them. 

The utilitarian is aware of this also, and invokes the aid 
of the community against the stupid and refractory indi- 
vidual. Morality, it reasons, is required for the common 
well-being, and a public sentiment will enforce it on those 
otherwise slow to concede it. Here, again, many things 
are overlooked, or too favorably regarded. It is true, so- 
ciety requires morality, but there is no other insight save 
that of these same blind individuals who make up society 
to discover this fact, and to enforce it. Failing in indi- 
vidual morality, we fail in social morality also. Society 
can not be better than its constituents. Society as a com- 
bination of selfish persons may selfishly enforce its own 
interests, but such an enforcement will not be converted, 
in its very putting forth, into benevolence. It is quite 
without reason to suppose that men collectively will 
achieve a moral character which does not belong to them 
separately, and that selfishness by simple extension will 
take the place of good-will. 

If we look closely at this method of social evolution, we 
shall see that it destroys the autocracy of every spirit, 



gS ^ THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

and so makes virtue itself ignoble. Instead of begetting- 
virtue, it would tend to extinguish any sporadic virtue 
there might chance to be. The individual is driven on by 
the many, themselves no more virtuous than he, and 
so his action loses true, personal quality. A man is 
virtuous by his own convictions and his own incentives ; 
constraint removes the very conditions of virtue. Society 
is, indeed, the occasion of individual growth, but is not 
itself the seat of that growth. Moral life has only one 
centre, the heart of man. The view then remains sound, 
that pleasures still unharmonized, whether acting on im- 
mature powers in the individual or in society, are temp- 
tations so blinding the intellect that they can not be over- 
come within themselves ; the higher balance must be 
attained by a higher law. It is the more noteworthy that 
this fundamental principle should have been so clearly 
and frequently returned to by Christ, as he also recog- 
nizes the fact that pleasure shall follow after, and add 
itself to, virtue. He does not allow the pursuit of those 
very enjoyments, which are to be consequent on right- 
eousness. 

Nor is the utilitarian able to define the rational value 
of different susceptibilities. He has the one word pleas- 
ure, and all other words, happiness, enjoyment, blessed- 
ness, must be translatable into it, like prices expressed in 
dollars. Pleasures may differ in amounts, but not in 
kind. A difference in kind breaks down all computa- 
tions. We can not carry into the same market two incon- 
vertible currencies. Moreover, different kinds of pleasure, 
recognized as such and incomparable with each other, im- 
ply a rational ideal, and a rational insight into its terms, 
and this is intuition. A mere evolution of pleasures 
acting in the same field in the same way, can not concede 



THE LAW OF CONSECRATION. 99 

this diversity. A life so diversely made up can only 
justify itself by means of a spiritual ideal in which dif- 
ferent pleasures play different parts, and are united in 
some higher idea. This view is intellectual, permeated 
with notions of nobility not to be rendered in terms of 
pleasure. Herein is a fatal w^eakness in utilitarianism. 
It insists on pleasure, as if it were a simple fact of one 
order, and not many facts of different orders. It is 
misled by the unity of the word. If pleasures are one^ 
they must be all expressible in terms of physical en- 
joyments, as these are the initial pleasures. Good must 
mean physical good, or that which can be translated in 
terms of physical good. Such a theory is pushed forward 
in oversight of our spiritual constitution, and assumes 
at once a physical simplicity of emotional life which 
plainly does not exist. The intuitionalist claims that to 
the reason of man, pleasures, in their full variety, have 
an instruction and a rendering of their own, and that 
w^e must bring to these facts of our constitution, insight, 
as we would to the w^ords of a poet. The utilitarian 
claims that these sensible facts, as facts, have in themselves 
a governing power which needs only to be applied ; 
and this application time is sure to bring. In the one 
view, sensible facts are operative through the interpreta- 
tion of the reason ; in the other, they are operative by 
virtue of their force as facts of our sensitive constitution. 

Utilitarianism is also at war w^th a familiar fact of ex- 
perience, which its most acute defenders have not failed 
to recognize, but can not explain ; to wit, that pleasure 
constantly escapes direct pursuit, and follows on when 
duty is freely accepted. Though this principle is not quite 
as true of physical enjoyments as of higher ones, still the 
law discloses itself even here. Not only does the pam- 



100 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

pered appetite rapidly lose the power of appreciation ; 
labor, exposure, and abstinence so sharpen the appetites 
that they bring a keen relish to the coarsest food. Enjoy- 
ment is conditioned on robust health, and robust health 
demands activity. Labor, therefore, which is undertaken 
in neglect of physical pleasures, often meets with a reward 
paid in these very pleasures. 

With every step upward, the law becomes increasingly 
clear. Self-culture, if it is sought in a self-conscious spirit, 
brings with it many petty and personal irritations, — evils 
which it itself creates for its own annoyance — and, as 
culture, easily misses that large and catholic feeling on 
which the power to grasp knowledge so much depends. 
The direct pursuit of honor is still more difficult. Men 
seem to conspire against rendering honor which is claimed, 
even though the claim is based in justice. A neglect of 
honor, even a certain scorn of it, is not an unfavorable 
condition of securing it. This is not due to any perver- 
sity in men, but to a strong feeling that the most honor- 
able action is the most self-forgetful one, that noble purposes 
move outward with least thought of one's own interests. 
Disinterestedness is a supreme social virtue, and meets, as 
society increases in intelligence, a supreme social reward, 
• — a reward in turn which is not measured by the good 
achieved so much as by the sacrifice incurred. The quick- 
ness and depth of discernment which men often bring to 
this quality are not a little surprising, when w^e remember 
the under-current and upper-current of selfishness every- 
where present. There are to be seen, amid the passions 
and prejudices of men, many examples of praise foolishly 
and unjustly bestowed ; but in spite of them all, the law, 
that honor is not to be sought, manages to disclose itself 
in a signal way. No characteristic is more acceptable to 



THE LAW OF CONSECRATION. lOI 

men than generous self-forgetfulness. The immediate 
annoyances, on the other hand, which an eager desire 
for honor brings to its possessor, are very great, and go far 
to compensate any gains in its pursuit. 

When we come to the spiritual affections, we find that 
self-forgetfulness, as pirit lifted above its own pleasures, 
is of their very essence. Patriotism, benevolence, love, 
mean this outward vision of the mind and heart, and the 
reaction of these virtues on the happiness of the person 
who exercises them turns on the singleness and sincerity 
of this spiritual sight. 

The facts, then, of the rational world do not, even in 
their present mixed form, accept the law of pleasure, no 
matter with what sagacity it may be laid down. If the 
pursuit of pleasure is insisted on as a law, — even though 
it be made as broadly comprehensive of the pleasures of 
others as it is possible it should be and retain its own in- 
centives — it can not be followed as a law without involv- 
ing failure. Its spirit is too contracted for the terms with 
which it has to deal. Under the narrow experiences and 
brief periods of animal life it may be applicable, but under 
the varied experiences and long periods of human life it is 
not applicable. Facts return upon us too remotely, by 
too circuitous routes, and with too much reference to the 
inner intent of conduct, to make this a safe law. The in- 
junction under which we must take up life is a profound 
fear of its inherent forces, and a slight fear of its accidents; 
a profound fear of God, and a slight fear of men. A 
tempest of wind may fill the air with dust, and create 
many dangers ; it leaves the highways unaltered. 

Morals as enforced by Christ, and by most great teachers 
of morals, involve a notion of law, and a power to discern 
that law. What, indeed, would morals be without a law. 



102 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

The utilitarian is not content with such a result, and seeks 
for a law of morals in the joint action of men, having found 
no place for it in their individual action. He makes it a 
product of the collective life rather than of personal life. 
This is every way an ignoble transfer, and a feeble effort 
to find in many what can not be found in any one of the 
many. Yet the law, if found, must in some way be trans- 
ferred again to the individual, and become the guide of 
his action. It can not be transferred otherwise than by 
fear and pleasure, or by insight. To transfer it in the first 
method destroys at every stage the disinterestedness and 
rationality of the law, and makes it one of sensibilities to 
which society in part is the medium. There can be 
no nobility of action which does not turn on individual 
endowments of insight and obedience. To remove the 
moral law as moral from the thoughts of men is wholly to 
debase it. 

Intuitionalism recognizes a law of morals that, like 
other laws, calls for study, and is caught sight of only 
slowly and by sustained effort. It is seen not in the 
heavens but on the earth. It is a law of conduct, and 
must recognize and cover all the facts of conduct. It lies 
in the facts it marshals, but it lies there for the reason of 
man, and not for his sensitive organism simply. It ad- 
mits of no abstract, absolute statements prior to experi- 
ence, and aside from its concrete forms, but it gathers 
light in and with these forms. It is not to be regarded as 
a mystic sentence written on a w^all, waiting the transla- 
tion of a prophet, but it is to be sought into as it is and 
where it is, in rational actions w^iose relations are ration- 
ally apprehended, and whose results are daily disclosed 
in every variety of pain and pleasure. These pains and 
pleasures must be known in their moral values ; in the ways 



THE LAW OF CONSECRATION. IO3 

in which they vanish at one point and reappear at another ; 
in the manner in which an immediate pain returns later 
as a pleasure and a pleasure as a pain ; above all, in the 
subtile spiritual transformations which they undergo, with 
a constant reversal of primary character. What intuition- 
alism claims is that conduct, being understood, offers a law 
of order to the reason. When this statement assumes 
the form of the greatest good of the greatest number, it is 
still reason that pronounces on its adequacy and gives it 
its authority. 

A stoical attitude of defiance toward pleasure is partial 
and inadmissible in morals. It is not the attitude of 
Christ. He came eating and drinking. He entered freely 
into the pleasures of all. In some particulars the position 
of Epicurus is superior to that of Zeno. It does not hide 
or strive to thrust into the background the facts that are 
to be dealt with nnder the moral law, — the infinitely 
varied facts of human happiness. The estimate of life 
was made too exclusively in terms of pleasure, but these 
terms do most extendedly express its quality. It is these 
facts of human well-being, but partially understood and 
daily to be studied, with the clearer facts of the human 
constitution, that, spread before the mind of man, give rise 
in it — not elsewhere — to settled convictions as to the lines 
of action which are fit to be pursued, — which ought to be 
pursued ; lines not absolute, yet which plainly involve 
fixed principles. These snatches of vision are vision, and 
put the moral nature on the same terms of growth as the 
intellectual nature. No inquiry is excluded, diligent cor- 
rection is demanded, pains and pleasures are expository 
terms, — are the colors which play in the light in the dis- 
closure of things ; but in all this medley of things laws are 
seen, — seen, as all law is seen, by the reason — principles 



104 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

emerge, and the ultimate conditions of good order and 
good order itself come into the spiritual vision. Among 
these principles are justice, veracity, good-will. *' It is 
impossible to live pleasantly," says Epicurus, " without 
living wisely and well and justly, and it is impossible to 
live wisely and well and justly without living pleasantly." 
To make this passage truly significant, we must contrast 
wisdom and goodness and justice with pleasure, and be 
ready to affirm that the law of these virtues is the condi- 
tion of well-being. Pleasure becomes an index of charac- 
ter, a declaration which in a long series of years discloses 
the nature of the moral forces at work. It is not the root 
of wisdom and virtue, it is their fruit ; something which 
is the product of that harmony of life that these have 
brought about ; something which discloses the ultimate 
mastery of virtue over life. If we overlook the interpre- 
tation which pain and pleasure bring to human life, w^e 
shall make bitter mistakes ; if we guide ourselves by them 
without first expounding them in the laws they help to 
declare, we shall make still more bitter mistakes. As 
physical pains and pleasures are terms of diagnosis in 
therapeutics, so all pains and pleasures are a revelation of 
the forces at work among men. 

But this relation implies primary constitutional laws 
which underlie these results, and which may be discerned 
and obeyed. The power to see a law as a law is the 
supreme function of reason, and belongs to reason alone. 
The utilitarian may summarize his system as the pursuit 
of the greatest good of the greatest number, — and a very 
excellent summation it is — but we were with him as 
moral beings, discerning good and evil — not simply 
pleasure and pain — long before he reached this succinct 
statement ; as moral beings, also, we decide what is the 



THE LAW OF CONSECRATION. I05 

greatest good of the greatest number ; and when this Is 
satisfactorily settled, it is still the insight of our moral 
nature that announces this pursuit as a law of righteous- 
ness. Indeed, the failure of simple utilitarianism Is no- 
where more conspicuous than when it approaches the end 
of its labor. Let it reach and stand facing this its final 
statement, or any other statement it may prefer ; what is 
to convert it into a law ? As merely comprehended it Is 
not a law. Nothing can make it a rational law, save the 
insight of reason. Turned into a law in any other way, 
its enforcement is tyranny, — the spirit loses its own 
autocracy. We wait patiently for the utilitarian to make 
his ultimate appeal. To what can it be made, save to the 
mind itself. In its comprehending power? If he ventures 
to go elsewhere for authority, we must denounce him as 
the accomplice of tyrants. How profoundly Mill felt 
this, when he expressed his willingness to go to hell rather 
than obey a command he did not himself approve, even 
though put forth by God himself ? There is no escape 
here, unless the utilitarian dares to say that this law of 
the greatest good of the greatest number is a physical 
one, and so a fact that cares for Itself. The case is not 
much different from that presented by the statement, two 
and two make four ; make four to what, to the senses or 
to the reason ? 

All great virtue in its greatness implies a law in- 
wrought in conduct of which it has caught sight, which it 
is pursuing, obeying. Such a mind has faith in the law, 
faith in growth under the law, faith in an ideal state 
toward which this growth is directed. It never confounds 
the passing terms of expression in pains and pleasures 
with the ultimate principles which they expound. Such 
a mind derives its nobility from the nobility of the truth, 



I06 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

as the eye gets its lustre from the light. It understands 
what is meant by principle, and plants itself upon it, 
believing it to run far beyond its vision, and to constitute 
the real connection of the past with the present, of the 
present with the future. 

This leads us to the second conviction of intuitive 
morals, which accompanies this of law and grows out of 
it, — that of immortality. The moral law is one of great 
scope, and demands corresponding time for its fulfilment. 
It is a law that is fitted to balk and baffle the mind in its 
first application, to bring it endless perplexity and ap- 
parently useless disaster, unless a sufficiently long time is 
granted it to take in the full circuit of growth. The 
moral law, in common with other laws that pertain to life, 
has a period, looks to a progressive unfolding, no part of 
which is complete without the whole. We may make this 
our present life a laborious beginning of the line of action 
demanded by virtue, but we can reach no proportion, no 
symmetry, in our action ; w^e can enter on the conflict, 
but we can not bring it to an end ; we can put before our- 
selves noble purposes, but we can not attain unto them ; 
we can reach advanced positions of growth, but the full 
fruits of growth will still lie beyond us. The moral law, 
limited to the present, offers the practical anomaly and 
theoretical absurdity of a law of life which includes a 
longer period than that granted the being whose it is. 
As this incongruity takes place in the highest region of 
conscious life, none could be greater, none more unfortu- 
nate and disappointing. The moral law does sustain 
itself, and must sustain itself, by a large range of motives, 
corresponding to the breadth of its own government. To 
cut it short is to cripple it. Vice may win brief victories 
over virtue, as folly may over wisdom. A large instru- 



THE LAW OF CONSECRATION. 10/ 

mentality demands a field commensurate with its opera- 
tions. The longer the period, and the more extended the 
interests involved, the more certainly do wisdom and 
virtue declare themselves, and win their own. They are 
the laws of grand aggregates, the ultimate and most com- 
prehensive laws of rational life. Not more does the moral 
law call for time, that it may fully justify itself, than does 
time call for the moral law, that its years maybe pregnant 
with events of increasing moment, and its lengthening 
spaces be filled with the great spectacle and growing 
achievements of rational life — the life that reason yearns 
for. 

So deep is this necessity, that those gifted with a pro- 
found moral nature, who have lost the faith of immortality, 
have, in the effort to escape spiritual suffocation, substituted 
the life of the race for that of the individual, and have 
striven to draw from the perfections of humanity motives 
large enough and lasting enough to drive the moral 
mechanism of their own natures and of society. The 
effort is a noble one, and the only one which remains to 
them. It is a convulsive struggle to hold on to the life 
that is escaping them. It is a grand testimony to the 
depth of moral aspiration in the human spirit, and to 
the labors of self-denial it will gladly undertake in its be- 
half. The impulse is full of refined benevolence. The 
misfortune is that it can only retain a ghost-like image of 
the hope which belongs to it. If men individually are 
ephemeral, if virtue in each of them is forever incipient, 
if it proposes duties which are never met, and attainments 
that are never made, then an endless procession of these 
abortive beings loses nobility, and has no power to rouse 
the mind to hope. What we are in the inadequacy of our 
aims our children must be in their aims. It is a blind 



I08 THE WOflDS OF CHRIST. 

passion of parentage which leads the father to sacrifice 
himself for the son, with no certainty that the son can be 
essentially better than himself. The dignity and inde- 
pendent worth of the father must be maintained for his 
own sake, and for the sake of his son ; and when the 
son absorbs the life of the father, he is likely to waste 
both lives. The son Is rich only as the father is rich also ; 
good can not be forever thrown forward, for each son is in 
turn a father. What is true in the narrow relation is true 
also in the broader one. No generation can find its own value 
in the next generation, or rightly sacrifice itself to it. 
Each generation in succession must be an heir to its own 
life, and so an heir of the life that has gone before it, 
and so a fitting parent to that which follows it. There 
is no possibility of rolling up moral values by imbeciles, 
by those who have themselves no part in them, and so 
pushing the accumulated mass on and on, hoping that 
some worth may at length attach to it, or some place of 
lodgment be found for it. An incipient and disappointing 
experience can not be completed by a thousand repeti- 
tions ; each, rather, is a fresh aggravation. If virtue as a 
law is out of sorts with us, it will be out of sorts with our 
children. The gains that are possible from generation to 
generation, even if these gains should remain possible on 
the hard terms of a speedy mortality in full vision, would 
have no permanent significance. The incongruity would 
every moment accompany them, of powers withering in 
the bud. The manifest increase of this evil in the enlarge- 
ment of the blighted powers could bring no correction of 
it. It is his abuse of powers that assuages our grief at the 
death of a man ; the loss of perfected powers would 
become at every stage less bearable. 

It is a strong spirit that can retain its purpose, when the 



THE LAW OF CONSECRATION. IO9 

means of its accomplishment are disappearing ; it is a 
vigorous soul that can preach a synthesis of humanity, 
when humanity is passing at every moment under the 
hopeless and remediless disintegration of death ; when the 
only unity that can ever be achieved for it is like that 
of a mobile centre in a cyclone. Whence are the motives 
of the average man to come, which shall lead him to push 
forward development, when development itself is so 
partial and so futile a thing — a little grace of motion in 
atoms that are taken in and thrown out along the paths of 
force. 

Under such conditions true wisdom seems to be ex- 
pressed in a sober Epicureanism, that allows itself to neg- 
lect no pleasure and to become the slave of no pleasure; 
that undertakes no great labors because there are no suit- 
able returns for them. Such a spirit, slightly tempered 
with Stoicism in the endurance of inevitable evils, would 
seem, under the condition of mortality, to be the spirit 
most in harmony with the conditions of man. An enthu- 
siasm and nobility that are not called out by facts, nor 
sustained by facts, near or remote, physical or spiritual, 
are ill-sorted and vaporing, a supersensuous chivalry of 
the soul that can create no light, and may easily waste 
the light there is. The reason that they now help us is 
that they now stand in profound accord with the consti- 
tution of the mind, with immediate and remote facts. 
When virtue is once convicted of foolish excess, it must 
lose its hold on sober minds. 

The words of Christ, in their self-denial, retained their 
wisdom and inspiration, because his calm, clear vision 
ranged over an immense period, and united the efforts of 
incipient virtue to the results of its mature strength, be- 
cause he contemplated a new life in its entire circuit. He 



no THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

not only allowed things to move forward to their comple- 
tion, he saw them in their completion, and gathered his 
motives from them in this superlative form. The light of 
a spiritual life fell upon his face, he was fanned by winds 
from an invisible world that caught up his words and bore 
them outward. He brought life and immortality to light, 
by taking them each moment into the circuit of his 
thought and by reflecting them in his speech. His words 
without this inspiration and this faith would become the 
dying tones of a bell in an exhausted receiver. No vio- 
lence of motion could remedy the want of a suitable 
medium. 

The secret of human life lies largely in its hold on time. 
A quickj tight grip of the times that are nearest us means 
sagacity. A wide reaching out to the full measure of our 
lives is wisdom. An over-passing of life in our thoughts 
and plans is the virtue of religion. 

Intuitive morals, resting upon a rational law, and claim- 
ing the needful time for its fulfilment, imply a present 
want of harmony in human action, inchoate and unbalanced 
conditions, w^hich are to be brought forward in growth by 
the mind's own efforts. At this point of power and re- 
sponsibility the moralist plants himself. There can be no 
flinching. To yield here is to allow an inroad of the physical 
and the necessary into the field of the spiritual and the 
free. He claims for himself conduct in its entirety, and 
sets up over it the moral law. Compromise and conces- 
sion, which modify this position, are impossible ; the neces- 
sary extinguishes the free, and the free excludes the 
necessary. Moral elements do not wait upon the growth 
of physical ones, nor even of social ones. It is their office 
to take possession of the one class, and to call forth and 
guide the other. When the good thing that may be done 
is present to the mind, the duty enters with it. 



THE LAW OF CONSECRATION. Ill 

Under these conditions — the presence of a supreme law, 
time for its full development, and powers ready for 
obedience — intuitive morals demand consecration ; im- 
mediate, and unflinching obedience. This obedience ex- 
presses the real relation of the moral law to the facts 
ordered by it. The harmony of the facts is only to be 
obtained by the supremacy of the law ; this is what law 
means. The confusion and malformation of the facts are 
due to disobedience. We are to see as first that which is 
constructively and ideally first ; and which will bring 
order and beauty into all secondary relations. 

The law of consecration is also demanded as the only 
sufficient source of strength in moments of conflict. The 
moral struggles of life take place between the accumulated 
inducements of lower impulses and the more remote and 
indeterminate proffers of our spiritual nature. The 
strength that is to suffice in this conflict must be of a 
complete and transcendent order; a movement of faith 
and not of sight. As long as any doubt remains in the 
mind of the superlative force of the moral law, or any 
feeling that law is found in harmonizing the interests 
which crowd the visible horizon, we shall be open to con- 
cession which will sweep the ground from beneath our feet, 
and leave us to battle for spiritual life against forces as vio- 
lent and as variable as the waves of the ocean, each separate 
onset threatening ruin. Under such conditions nothing 
gives the peace of assured victory, but the law of conse- 
cration, held serenely in the soul. The grand moral force 
which often showed itself in Stoicism was nothing more 
than a somewhat blind assertion of the just domination 
of the inner life over all its external accessories and against 
all passing dangers. Herein were the elevation and the 
value of Stoicism, in a stanch assertion of moral manhood. 



112 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

The young" man that drew to himself the quick sympa- 
thies of our Saviour in his effort toward a well-ordered 
life, was brought abruptly to this test of consecration, as 
the most direct means of disclosing to him that his formal 
beauty of action was not sufificiently sustained by the 
inner force of the spirit. Go and sell that thou hast, and 
give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven ; 
and come and follow me. He was called to do this diffi- 
cult thing that his strength might be measured by it ; that 
an obscure weakness and misdirection of effort which 
were lurking in his moral constitution might be disclosed 
to him, and that he might begin at once to make those 
higher attainments which were open to him/ 

That this supremacy of the moral life is not an impos- 
sible or even very rare fact among men, history makes 
plain, and, in doing It, it also discloses the supreme energy 
which accompanies complete consecration. It is not so 
much the harmony of moral impulses that tells on the 
progress of the race, as it is the force of these impulses. 
There has been no extended renovation, no marked move- 
ment onward, without the unflinching action of some 
minds in some fresh moral direction. The convictions that 
prompted the effort may have been partial ; they may have 
brought severe limitations to intense truth, adding bigotry 
to liberty ; they may have carried with them manifest mis- 
chief, but the indispensable and valuable element has 
been thorough-going obedience to an independent moral 

^Strauss and others make sharp criticism on the manner with which Christ 
dealt with this rich young man, and, taking the injunction, Go sell that 
thou hast, with other passages, regard Christianity as containing an ele- 
ment at war with industrialism. It is true that Christianity is not a gospel 
of political economy simply, that it builds upon and over the foundations of 
labor the superstructure of a higher life, but it does this in no antagonism to 
industry. Christ's method with the young man was exceptional ; his injunc- 
tion M'as specific, not general. It involved simply the priority of spiritual to 
pecuniary interests ; of the laws of the kingdom of grace to those of wealth. 



THE Lx\W OF CONSECRATION. II3 

conclusion. In a choice between a Luther and an Erasmus, 
the flow of events will always accept Luther as the con- 
trolling force and fact. Harmony waits on energy ; sym- 
metry, on life. Not till a point of conviction bordering 
on fanaticism has been reached, do men begin to be 
moved by their fellows. This arises not from any inferior 
moral value in harmony, but from the fact that the har- 
mony men usually attain to is one of feebleness and not 
one of strength ; one in which great things are sacrificed 
to little ones, and not a harmony in which little things 
are gathered up in the shadow of great ones. An equi- 
librium which arises from hesitation is a balancing of 
powers, not a use of them. It is a first interest among 
men to secure in some direction the moral force which 
shall express the vigor of the moral law, w^hile this 
law will later gather to itself all collateral aids. Complete 
and symmetrical as are the teachings of Christ, there is no 
effort to set them in order one against another. They are 
each incisive in its own direction, and they occasionally 
bear the impress put upon them by the narrow and inert 
habit of mind which they assailed. Resist not evil ; but 
whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek turn to him 
the other also. It is easier for a camel to go through the 
eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom 
of heaven. These statements, like a strong bow strongly 
bent, fling the arrow of truth toward the mark with stern 
purpose, though after-thought is called for to unite them 
perfectly with subordinate and sustaining truths. Men 
readily forget that the effort to understand is a large 
part of the advantage of understanding. The law of con- 
secration, while it may seem for a moment to mar the 
harmony of life, is yet the fundamental condition of that 
harmony. The harmony the soul is to attain is not that 



114 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

of many equal things, but of many subordinate and su- 
perior things gathered up in one supreme movement. The 
fir gains its symmetry by a continuous push upward and 
so outward ; the spirit gains its symmetry by an obedience 
to its own law which becomes free and delightful, and 
more and more includes all that is in keeping with it, or 
in any way enriches it. The power of movement carries 
with it the grace of movement, and the dominance of the 
dominant idea easily accepts all that properly partakes in 
it. When the ship moves, it obeys the helm. Weakness 
in action arises from busying ourselves with little things 
and feeble counsels ; power in action, from a controlling 
purpose that gives value to all that is associated with it. 

We have, then, afresh to mark the moral compass of the 
life of Christ. He clearly announces the fundamental law of 
morals, in every grade of it. The life is more than 
meat, and the body is more than raiment. No man can 
wisely sacrifice the health and beauty of the body for that 
which clothes it, nor the force and balance and tone of life 
for that which feeds it. There is in every moral relation 
that w4iich is inner and higher, to which the outer and 
lower must submit itself. This is the principle: Whosoever 
will save his life shall lose it ; but whosoever will lose his 
life shall save it. Here, by a subtile shifting of the word 
life from the centre to the circumference and back again, we 
have a telling contrast between the spirit and its surround- 
ings, and a clear assertion in it not only of prior worth, 
but of an organic power able to carry with it everywhere 
complete beauty. 

Not only does our Saviour penetrate in his instruction 
to the core of our moral life, he supports his words by all 
the motives needful to make them effective, and embodied 
them in a life wholly expressive of their nature, Mak- 



THE LAW OF CONSECRATION. II5 

ing way for religious liberty, he encountered the blind- 
ness and bigotry of his nation, and laid down his life that 
he might win it again for himself and for the world. He 
thus marked out the only path that leads or ever can 
lead upward, becoming to us the way, the truth, and the 
life. The one central, working law of our moral nature, 
that of sacrifice, reaches its culminating expression in the 
cross of Christ ; and so that cross in turn becomes the 
symbol of consecration, the highest activity of our highest 
thoughts and affections. These moral foundations can 
only fail us, when our moral constitution itself gives 
way. If this rendering of the spirit of man in its nature 
and laws of growth is not a true rendering, the work 
of Christ is superseded ; but if these principles reach to 
the centre of our being, they carry with them the 
Messiahship of Christ. The question is not a remote 
one, but one just at hand. If a supreme hold must be 
taken on spiritual truth in utter obedience as the con- 
dition of moral beauty, then is Christ the lord of life. 



CHAPTER VII. 
Individual Growth. 

The speech of men is full of words expressive of dis- 
interested actions and noble qualities, and these words 
find familiar application to their own conduct and attain- 
ments. These words necessarily diminish in number and 
decrease in scope, when the characters of men give little 
occasion for them and no incentive to their use. We do 
not behold virtues with our senses, nor yet apprehend 
them in the abstract ; they are a complexus of qualities 
given us in our personal experience. The virtues of others 
will be lost to us, if we do not in some degree share them. 
Purity in man, as in water, is a condition of reflection, at 
least in the region of right action. 

Though this principle, that the glossary of all spiritual 
words must be found in ourselves, admits of considerable 
qualification, it is none the less one of profound signifi- 
cance. As men are dependent on the perfection of a 
mirror for a complete view of their own faces, so are they 
dependent on the well-ordered images given in their own 
characters for insight into the characters of those about 
them. Even vice itself may disclose itself but narrowly 
to the vicious mind. Mean qualities and narrow moral 
endowments begin at once to put fearful limitations on a 
knowledge of the spiritual world. The point at which 
this principle brings the severest restriction is in our 
apprehension of God. That our idea of God is a reflec- 
tion of our own moral nature is a fact involved in an 

ii6 



INDIVIDUAL GROWTH. 11/ 

inevitable relation, and one that carries with it serious con- 
sequences. Out of this dependence have sprung the worst 
results of faith. The immorality of the immoral com- 
munity has been a contagion extending even to the gods. 
When a nation's gods are perverted, the evil is radical, to 
be overcome only by a spiritual revolution. A steady induc- 
tion of evil is set up between the visible and the invisible, 
by which all mischief on the one side repeats itself on the 
other. The bad man in dealing with bad men, spurs on an 
evil action by the evil conception which precedes it. He 
creates for himself, in his interpretation of human con- 
duct, conditions which to his mind call for injury, even 
giving It the appearance of justice. 

It was in part at least this sense of the steady and 
appalling reverberation of evil which the heavens reflected 
down upon men, that made Epicurus and Lucretius so 
anxious to push the gods one side in thought, into a region 
of remoteness and indifference, that simply human move- 
ments of mind and heart, rid of these perverting impres- 
sions, might proceed again in a more quiet and truly moral 
way. 

The Stoic endeavored to attain the same result by 
bracing his mind up to moral resistance ; by affirming 
Its superiority to, and independence of, the conditions 
assigned It. 

Yet this interpretation of the Unknown by the known 
arises from the very nature of the case, is the process by 
which the mind correlates its motives with its own moral 
states, and lives in a world of harmonious and coherent 
impressions ; the very process also by which it moves for- 
ward, putting before itself at each step a new, better, 
holier, more inspiring Idea. It is the condition of growth 
that a larger thought, a purer affection, a stronger faith, 



Il8 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

should enable the mind so to apprehend the moral force 
of the Universe about it as to stand with it on increasingly 
free, loving, and living terms. 

Christianity, in its actual development, has constantly 
stumbled at this very point. It has not been wiUing that 
the conception of God and his government should remain 
fluent, ready to receive every increment of knowledge, 
ready to gather definition and fulness of expression with 
eveiy increase of the power of reflection in any human 
soul, the conception itself a partaker in growth and ready 
to subserve all the purposes of growth. It has not been 
willing that the revelation of God in Christ should pass 
from disclosure to disclosure, till we, beholding as in a 
glass the glory of God, should be changed into the same 
image, from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of God. 
Notions which should have remained flexible, becoming 
inflexible, have bound close the thoughts of men to the 
conceptions of past centuries ; doctrines narrowly con- 
structed and severely rendered, have misrepresented the 
moral force of the presence of Christ in the world, and 
have so far betrayed it. The Christian religion has in its 
turn become subject to the inadequate opinions of past 
generations, and once distorted has accumulated growth 
along these lines of distortion. It has been slow to a.ffi.rn\ 
its perpetual freedom, or, when this freedom has been lost 
to regain it again, and resume its progressive unfolding. 
The more wTlnkled the mirror, the more firmly have men 
believed that it expressed the facts reflected by the mirror. 

This difiiculty and this danger men do not escape either 
within or beyond the circles of faith. The pessimism of 
the pessimist is the distillation of his own thoughts Avith 
which he embitters the world about him. The gratitude 
of a grateful spirit looks out with longing, loving eyes on 



INDIVIDUAL GROWTH. II9 

the things before it. Questions of evil and of good turn 
on the responses which events awaken in our own sensitive 
organism; we can hardly judge them independently of 
these sensibilities. It is no accusation against the laws of 
physical life that an inebriate falls off from pleasure. It 
is no disparagement of the spiritual universe that those 
who are but partial participants in its methods do not en- 
joy them. Sight is made for eyes, and sound is addressed 
to ears. Spiritual things are spiritually discerned, and 
spiritual pleasures are spiritually enjoyed. The deep 
questions in life are for this reason not to be quickly an- 
swered, for they imply an experience commensurate with 
their own magnitude. Are there spiritual pleasures, and 
what is their value to those who enjoy them ? That those 
who miss them shall misapprehend them is a matter of 
course. The plans of the Universe can be comprehended 
only as they pass into a measure of completeness. This 
is not because supernatural powers are called for, but 
because natural powers are misdirected and perverted. 
Music is the product of sweet bells, not of bells jangled 
and out of tune. 

Two things then plainly follow : faith must preserve in 
full degree the freedom of progress, and this progress 
must express itself in the perfection of individual charac- 
ter. This is the double and inseparable process, a better 
apprehension of the harmonies of the spiritual world, and 
a better rendering of them in life. Not to see is not to 
do, and not to do is not to see. 

Noble natures have shown their nobility in making self- 
culture a chief aim, in an insatiable longing in some direc- 
tions or in many directions for a personality of high quali- 
ties. They have sharply distinguished between things 
which pertained to themselves, and those which simply 



120 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

belonged to their surroundings. Less noble natures strive, 
in a surreptitious and impossible way, to appropriate as 
their own the advantages of their environment. It is the 
power which the acquisition of wealth implies, and the 
power incident to its expenditure, when lodged in the 
hands of true men, that feed the pride of its foolish pos- 
sessor. The feast is often a wholly ideal one, an illusion 
of the world in which we live. 

Men have not overlooked the problem of self-culture 
and its essential relation to real good, though they have 
given it very inadequate treatment. They have caught 
sight of it from time to time as the one door by which 
men must enter into life ; and when religion has neglected 
it, or mistaken its method, it has done so to its own great 
confusion. Manliness and righteousness must coalesce, like 
the two images of two eyes, or we shall have but a dis- 
torted vision of the world. The more obvious forms of 
power, as physical strength, intellectual acuteness, and ex- 
tended knowledge, have been sought for ; the more urgent 
moral endowments, as courage and self-assertion, have 
been cultivated ; a full circle of refined sensibilities has 
been coveted ; and, as even better than this, a certain im- 
perturbability of the moral life has been desired, by which 
it is separated somewhat from the lives of those about us, 
and made to rise above the events of our own lives ; but 
self-culture has rarely been conceived as a steady expansion 
in due proportion of all our sensibilities, by which we at 
once possess the world and separate ourselves from it. 

Courage has perhaps been the most universally esteemed 
quality among men ; though they have often overlooked 
the narrow forms in which it has been offered, and the 
mean service to which it has been put. Self-assertion, as 
an expression of courage, has shared this honor. That 



INDIVIDUAL GROWTH. 121 

men should have been so profoundly impressed by cour- 
age, and in so many ways cultivated it, involve an appre- 
hension and movement deeply right, though these indi- 
cate a very tardy and immature moral development. 
Courage is a first condition of morality, as it is of all con- 
structive strength. It is the stamina of life, and must be 
had at all sacrifices. The moral implications, however, of 
the value we assign it, are like those of the adjective 
" honest," when employed to define the most noteworthy 
feature of a great statesman. 

We see in such a novelist as Thackeray, and in such a 
hero as Harry Esmond Warrington, that courage, physi- 
cal powers, vigorous appetites, and a fair circle of generous 
impulses, as the raw material out of which manliness may, 
by and by, be manufactured, are looked on with a very 
partial eye. Men seem content to see them each and all 
wasted for a time in a career of dissipation, while they 
console themselves with the presence of an unusual poten- 
tiality not yet hopelessly lost. They seem to fancy that, 
in some obscure way, vice is the coarse, succulent ferti- 
lizer that lies at the roots of virtue. The world has ex- 
perienced great difficulty in its self-cultivation in detect- 
ing partial forms and superficial shams, and so in overcom- 
ing the idea that virtue is one of these shams and the 
attribute of a milksop, or, at the very least, that there is 
a partial antagonism between virtues. Fortunate natural 
endowments have lorded it over acquired powers or virt- 
ues, as an indigenous aristocracy despises the interlopers 
of enlightenment. The hypocrisies and failures, which 
easily attach to hard-earned virtues, favor this view, while 
the robust health of natural endowments cast off more 
readily these parasites. Not till the eye of reason grows 
clear and firm at this very point can self-cultivation 



122 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

thrive. We must see that dissipation dissipates admirable 
qualities, that reckless action wastes generous impulses, 
that passion blinds the mind, and that the greater the 
endowment the more is it to be regretted that any portion 
of it should be lost. It is the self-abandonment of those 
lowest in indulgence that we should look on as a present 
fact with most allowance, since to them it is well-nigh the 
only thing that remains, — since with them it hastens a 
catastrophe that were better over. But how can we 
wisely so deprecate the end of vice and yet make light of 
the beginning? How can we admire the fool that throws 
coin after coin into the ocean, simply because that in 
hand is not the last one ? That which defiles a pure gar- 
ment is to be regretted, but the latest filth of a foul 
one, who thinks of it ? 

In our division of virtues, oddly enough, and with 
telling force against ourselves, we try to maintain the 
womanly moiety unabated. The first touches of vice and 
low habit have no fascination for us here. So Thackeray 
retains " one or two pure hearts to love and pray for his 
hero,"' — the ugly chrysalis that is still thought to contain 
the butterfly demanding this warmth of pure affection to 
bring it out. And so, indeed, it does ; nor is it that 
which we regret, but this confounding of the moral vision 
in finding our way. The glamour of half virtues, or it 
may even be the perversion of virtues, bewilders the eye 
of reason. We fail to understand, once for all, that every 
thing which is virtuous is noble, and only that is noble 
which is virtuous. There are no feminine virtues and no 
masculine virtues; there is only virtue one for all, and in 
all its forms beautiful. There are feminine faults and femi- 
nine temptations, masculine faults and masculine tempta- 
tions, but there is one wealth only, no part of which we 



INDIVIDUAL GROWTH. 1 23 

can afford to lose. He that is less pure and justly sensi- 
tive than a woman is by so much less admirable than she. 

So weak and timid are men that they escape hero- 
worship with utmost difficulty. The brilliant intellectual 
endowments of a Napoleon, though disassociated from 
almost ever>^ beneficent quality, almost every quality truly 
admirable, bewilder them ; they become like charmed 
birds before the eye of the serpent. They are willing 
that high poetic sensibilities, like those of Goethe, should 
feed eagerly on the affections of the spiritual world, even 
though these are consumed thereby, like a rose eaten of a 
worm. They are well-nigh ready to say : Herein is the 
archetype of the spiritual world ; the plant rightly nour- 
ishes the higher life of the insect. A sense of collision thus 
subdues the mind. Excellence is at the expense of excel- 
lence. Every question is one of sacrifice ; all construction 
is a process of waste. Heine, in connection with the 
most extravagant adulation of Goethe, adds : "' About his 
mouth a frigid stamp of egotism might have been noted ; 
but that trait belongs to the immortal gods." The repug- 
nant expression finds its way up to the immortal gods 
from our own crude fancy, and then comes back to us as 
if heaven-born. 

The best defence which men have offered to this feel- 
ing of conflict, a feeling inevitable in a narrow range of 
vision, a feeling which it will require the broad sweep of 
eternity wholly to remove, — disclosing how completely 
the inferior end is included in the superior one, how liber- 
ally all things are added unto us, Avhen we have once and 
for long sought the kingdom of heaven — is, aside from 
the words of Christ, Stoicism. Stoicism simply asserts the 
noble thing and stands by it, escapes the losses of conces- 
sion by despising it. Its strength is the sturdy strength with 



124 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

which it makes its affirmation, and waives aside a too nice 
discrimination. But Stoicism is holding fast in darkness ; 
what shall give us light? True, extended, continuous, 
concessive, firm self-culture is the condition of light, the 
condition of seeing both what is and what may be. Who 
shall become to us, in this culture of the spirit, the way, 
the truth, the life ? 

There are obviously new and superior principles of self- 
cultivation contained in the method of Christ, — principles 
we are not again to lose sight of. It is not necessary that 
we should assert that these truths were entirely unknown. 
Human nature and the divine method have been the same 
from the beginning. Snatches of vision may come at any 
time. What we are chiefly interested in are those declar- 
ations of method on the part of Christ which are so clear, 
full, and opportune, as to be a revelation, and remain with 
us as one. 

The passive virtues received in the Instructions of Christ 
a new position. Blessed are the poor in spirit ; for theirs 
is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the meek; for 
they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are the pure in 
heart ; for they shall see God. So long as the tyranny of 
the world seems, even to virtuous minds, its most out- 
standing feature, courage, self-assertion, and pride offer 
themselves as the most direct feelings with which to meet 
it. Without more or less of these qualities, one can hardly 
secure a footing for the other virtues he may possess. 
Humility and meekness have a flavor of servility, and 
seem to lead to servitude. It Is only a broad outlook 
over the spiritual world which discloses the merely primary 
character of these active virtues of resistance and resent- 
ment, which have played so important a part in the his- 
tory of the world, and places quite above them in serene 



INDIVIDUAL GROWTH. 12$ 

Strength and composure the passive virtues of humility 
and meekness. As long as the law of progress is thought 
to be, and measurably is, one of violence, and men expect 
to overcome evil with evil, to oppose hate to hate, to 
meet exaction by exaction, to overmatch pride with pride, 
and to undermine cunning with cunning, courage will be 
the one manly virtue. Indeed, so essential is courage, that 
it will always remain a necessary quality of any character in 
any good degree admirable. It is courage alone that puts 
us, pressed upon by our fellow-men, in possession of the 
conditions of independent and thoughtful action. Ti- 
midity is even more the foe of rational than of physical 
hfe. 

But when we learn that evil, though it may check evil, 
can not exterminate it, that the productive power of virtue 
is found only in virtue ; under this higher and more 
spiritual law, we see that our proper defensive weapons, 
and even offensive ones, are the passive virtues. It is a 
far greater result in the conflict with sin to escape un 
injured, than it is to suffer and to inflict injury. Out of 
the quiet endurance of the unrufHed spirit there proceeds 
the only true spirit of conquest. Christ set his disciples 
the task of renovating the world spiritually. To do this 
in any good degree, they must be able to keep at bay the 
evils of the world, so ready to call out corresponding evils 
in their own hearts. When the disciples wished to call 
down fire from, heaven to consume a village of Samari- 
tans, Christ told them that they neither had learned his 
spirit nor knew their own spirit. It is the immediate re- 
sult of any evil to extend itself under its own terms. 
Anger kindles anger, pride is offensive to pride, dogmatism 
bitterly censures dogmatism. This extension of evil arises 
from the fact that like conditions of evil exist in so active 



126 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

a form in all hearts. Passive virtue is the power to re- 
press these germs of passion in our own bosoms, to pre- 
vent the entrance of passion from abroad, and to use freely 
and wisely the palliatives by which we assuage its heat in 
others. 

The passive virtues imply a more extended experience 
than the active ones, and an experience more thoroughly 
spiritual. Humility, as a Christian grace, is but a fit im- 
pression on the sensitive mind of the largeness of the life 
upon which it has entered. It is the first product of the 
greatness and purity of the spiritual world, as it begins to 
disclose itself to us. The brutal man of arms may despise 
any aesthetic sentiment in a comrade, but his coarse con- 
tempt is a result of his coarse nature. Those outside the 
threshold of the spiritual kingdom may not feel the awx 
and humility of those who are passing it, for this light 
falls on us only as we enter, and only then begins to cast 
its shadows. Humility is not the result of depression, 
but of impression ; and is the antecedent condition of 
large attainments and extended hopefulness. 

Arrogance and pride shut us out of the spiritual treas- 
ures of the world. What the world really has of treasure 
is held in the minds and hearts of our fellow-men, and the 
doors of these storehouses are not opened to us when 
we knock at them loudly and threateningly. The blossom 
does not unfold itself more coyly to the warm touch of 
light than does the human spirit to the gentleness of the 
human spirit. Pride and scorn hedge up the only paths 
by which we can enter the Kingdom of Heaven as one of 
affection. We must find our way into the grottos that 
open on the sea, when the sea is at rest. Boisterous 
waves will only bring shipwreck at the entrance. Es-. 
pecially would meekness seem to be an unsuitable virtue 



INDIVIDUAL GROWTH. 12/ 

with which to subject the world, yet the promise is, the 
meek shall inherit the earth. When the mind is partially- 
free from the first illusions which attach to conquest and 
ownership, it is plain enough that these are more often 
than otherwise the means of expelling one from the real 
spiritual possession of the world ; and that one must enter 
into the life of the world simply by nearness, appreciation, 
fellowship. The passive virtues spring up later than the 
active ones, and turn more exclusively on the inner power 
of the mind. Christ in his instructions rises at once to 
the level of these virtues, and presents them distinctly as 
characteristic of his kingdom, — as the peace which per- 
vades it. His method as a moral method claims this 
mastery of moral forces within the soul itself. 

An allied truth is found in the last beatitude. Blessed 
are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and 
shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my 
sake. The school of virtue is as certainly one of suffering 
as of enjoyment. Henry Martyn expressed this depend- 
ence in the words, " to believe, to suffer, and to love." 
As sensitive beings we would not choose this relation. 
Nor does it seem to have any more permanent foundation 
than that of the immature and superficial quality of human 
thought and human virtue. Trying to give it a deeper 
relation than this the ascetic has perverted the ministra- 
tion of pain and passed through suffering voluntarily in- 
flicted to, one knows not what, states of mental and moral 
imbecility. If we are to grow by belief through suffering 
into love, belief and love must attend on every step. 
The evil borne must be evil wrongfully inflicted, and the 
end had in view must be the well-being of men. In such 
an experience, in which the thoughts and feelings are 
conjointly, vigorously, and soberly moved toward the 



128 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

Kingdom of God on earth, insight deepens, purposes 
strengthen, affections flow out and in amain, and we 
have the conditions of a mobile experience, and so of a 
truly masterful life. In accordance with this principle of 
consecration, Christ would have his disciples exultant at 
the spiritual gains which they had in hand, and not re- 
gretful at the physical losses that might accompany them. 
Nothing that deepens and develops our lives is to be 
deprecated. The pearl of great price having been found, 
there is to be no prudential hesitation in its purchase. 
Indeed, all men order any earnest discipline in this same 
way. Honor among men of honor is not allowed to bear 
any offence. Each man must put his life at risk on the 
instant to remove the danger. Noble things are not to 
be won by ignoble sacrifices. 

This early assertion of the passive virtues and of disci- 
pline through suffering are indications by Christ of the for- 
tunes of his kingdom, as to be sought after on the spirit- 
ual and not on the physical side of life. This impression 
he makes even more distinctly, when he assigns service to 
his disciples as their true insignia of honor. He that is 
greatest amongst you shall be your servant. Men usually 
place their stakes of happiness in the fulfilment of the 
desires, and their promises of personal development in the 
acquisition of powers, which will in turn minister to the 
desires. Christ places the motives and the rewards of 
action in the affections, and of cultivation in the unfold- 
ing of those powers by which we enlarge the lives of 
others, ourselves entering in to this enlargement. When 
we direct attention simply to self-cultivation, the end 
seems definite and noble. We do not doubt that any 
power of body or of mind is to be coveted, and that these 
powers are to be measured in value by what they enable 



INDIVIDUAL GROWTH. I29 

US to do, and by the support which they render each 
other. In the pursuit of self-cultivation, we feel that we 
can not well be at fault ; for disciplined powers will lend 
themselves to any undertaking. Yet in this effort after 
culture there is a perpetual postponement of the real 
problem of life ; there is a getting together of material 
without determining the kind of building we will erect 
with it. We are wont to think that when we have 
accumulated power the use of it in securing well-being 
will be simple and direct ; whereas in this lie the whole 
difficulty and mystery of life. Superior powers employed 
under inferior impulses only disclose more rapidly and 
more hopelessly the inadequacy of the ends which are 
offered to them. There can be no doubt that a large 
share of the pessimism of the present time is referable to 
this failure of self-culture, and arises from efforts directed 
toward aquisitions that have no purpose sufficiently com- 
prehensive to maintain and reward the labor involved. The 
man whose powers are meeting with inadequate returns 
must inevitably be tinctured with pessimism.^ As soon as 
powers have been acquired and are waiting expenditure, 
every question as to the ends and gains of life is thrown 
back upon us. He who pursues wealth may satisfy the 
mind for a time with an object of apparent and of real value, 
and find in his work many enjoyments incidental to the 
play of his faculties. That the question of ultimate well- 
being is simply deferred may not be apparent to him, till 
wealth has been secured, and he is compelled to decide 
how he will use it. He is then very likely to discover 

^ The conspicuous pessimism of Schopenhauer was accompanied by a 
fatalistic hedonism. When the feelings, after a vain pursuit of pleasure, be- 
gin to eddy back on the soul itself, we have all the conditions of pessimism. 
An adequate external object can alone sustain that full flow of sentiment, 
which is the buoyant force of a hopeful and pleasurable life. 



130 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

that the returns in happiness are by no means what he 
hoped they would be, and that to that degree he has 
wearied himself for nought. These results are ameliorated 
and disguised, first, by a continuance of pursuit, blind as 
it may be, and so satisfying the mind simply with its own 
activity. The good to be gained is thus not the wealth, 
but the labor that acquires the wealth. The devotee 
trudges on refusing inquiry; he takes the objects he has 
in view at the world's estimate and his own instinctive es- 
timate of them. Failure is thus at length identified with 
the fatigue of old age, into which it lapses and is lost. 
The incidents and accidents of life, as it has passed along, 
have imparted to it whatever worth it has had. As these 
wither it withers also. Such a life never reaches self-con- 
sciousness, never proposes to itself a sufficient purpose, or 
finds increasing satisfaction in its fulfilment. Life ripens 
only by decay. A second fact by vv^hich results of so in- 
ferior and unsatisfactory an order are made decorous and 
bearable are the elegances and refinements of life, its beau- 
tiful shell of appliances. While these have a very real 
value, they have a much greater apparent one. Ostensibly 
they are every thing. If mature minds and thoughtful 
minds do not find them to stand in happiness for what 
they represent to immature and thoughtless ones in 
the full excitement of pursuit, they only sadly whisper 
this fact in moments of depression to each other, and then 
strive to forget it. If the hue-and-cry of half a county 
has run down a hare, laugh at it, and try again. Public 
sentiment has but one opinion which it is willing to offer 
on this subject ; to distrust this would be to paralyze all 
effort, and pulverize all motives. The man who has run 
his race and won his crown still believes himself to 
be blessed, as fully as ennui and overworn faculties will 



INDIVIDUAL GROWTH. I3I 

allow him to be. The sensational verdict of life is thus 
accepted as at least less distasteful than the spiritual one. 
These results of action are also in a measure hidden, and 
more fortunately hidden, by the partial development of 
the affections which accompany them. These are the 
vines which still climb over and cover the ruined walls. 

A pursuit of knowledge as a chief direction of self-cult- 
ure has the advantage that it gives rise to varied activity, 
and proposes an end capable of being pushed forward 
indefinitely. The mind is not called on with the same de- 
cision to realize on its investments, or at any moment to 
count up its gains. Knowledge is easily accepted as an 
ultimate good. It may seem at the end as at the begin- 
ning of labor, that all which is needed is more time, more 
strength, more effort. There also may be present the 
noble faith that this knowledge will, in some unknown 
way, accrue to the benefit of men. 

The real solution of the problem of individual growth, 
is the discovery of some adequate purpose to which all 
one's powers may be directed. If there is any such purpose 
in life, if there is any centre at which all gains can be 
gathered and held, then life is not a failure. If there is no 
such purpose, though the fact may be more or less hidden 
from us till we near the end, by the many illusions preva- 
lent among men, life becomes a melancholy flashing up of 
hopes that flicker and die, and he is most fortunate who 
wakes latest, or wakes not at all, to this discovery. He 
who is to do any thing in any degree adequate for the cul- 
tivation of individual powers must meet this question of 
the primary end of life. Powers are to be cultivated in 
reference to it, and in its pursuit. The soul can not go 
on simply to exhaust itself by activity; the reaction of re- 
wards sufficient to sustain and remunerate effort must be 
provided for. 



132 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

There is no hesitancy in the method of Christ. We are 
to seek first a kingdom of righteousness on earth, and find 
our enjoyments in the affections which are called out by 
this end in its pursuit and attainment. Christ relies on the 
affections developed in building up a kingdom of truth, 
as sufficient incentives in happiness for the effort de- 
manded. We have not here a self-culture which leaves 
the end of life undefined, and can only partially estimate 
the relative values of our powers, — a self-culture that when 
it seems most complete may easily find itself the farthest 
off from any sufficient goal. We have from the beginning 
a simple and direct pursuit of the highest end, and one 
which grows in magnitude as w^e approach it, and calls out, 
in each stage of unfolding, emotions increasingly large, 
pure, and peaceful. Action and repose, hope and posses- 
sion meet in it, and life is roundabout and balanced. 

Men do not and will not trust the affections as sources 
of happiness. Having accumulated powers of any order, 
they begin to expend them in reference to personal ends, 
and so these powers, in their return of pleasure, sink to 
the level of desires, passions, appetites. A large fellow- 
ship with men, one so large as to be winnowed of the self- 
ish impulses that cling to more narrow relations, is not 
accepted as the secret of life. A little may be done grudg- 
ingly, but men do not often venture freely out on the 
theory of action laid down in our spiritual constitution. 
Yet the happiness that is attained is plainly found in this 
direction. A household whose members even measurably 
conform to this law is the seat of the best enjoyments. 
Truth and right assiduously sought for between men call 
forth at every step feelings of the highest order, feelings 
that crave nothing beyond themselves. If there is any 
sufficient theory of individual growth, if there is any root 



.INDIVIDUAL GROWTH. I 33 

of permanent life in the human spirit, which can justify 
it to itself now and forever, it is plainly this sympathetic 
union of men with the unfolding race of men. If the 
vision seems chimerical, it is only because it is still too far 
off from our craven thoughts, — because such long spaces of 
development still lie before us as to weary our childish 
minds. When we cultivate all our powers, and find their 
adequate use and reward in a pursuit of the well-being of 
men, we have attained the primary conditions of individ- 
ual growth. 

This discipline looks to the most extended dependence 
of man upon man, the most perfect union of man with 
man. It involves a ^' synthesis of humanity " under con- 
ditions of prolonged and complex development, passing 
up in each man into a full consciousness of a pervasive 
life of thought and affection in all toward all. So it has 
been in great periods of art ; the impulses of men have 
been unusually volatile, sympathetic, and extended. 

Life alone begets life, and the spiritual life of each per- 
son is drawn out toward the lives of his fellows. No por- 
tion of one's spiritual environment is superfluous in refer- 
ence to growth. Each step of consolidation in families, 
classes, races, nations, nationalities, evokes those larger 
thoughts and more extended sympathies which make this 
advanced organization possible. Failing at any point of 
these fitting ties between men, society sinks to that next 
lower combination at which they are found. Each power- 
ful and free nation, all concord between nations, testify 
to the conditions of growth as those of enlarged and 
enlarging fellowship. 

When religion separates its duties from those we owe 
to men, it easily becomes fanciful and fanatical, and 
misses the forces which are working spiritual progress in 



134 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

the world. But when religion takes as its own this very 
field of the moral relations which hold between men, — 
between men and God — it adds the highest incentives to 
those already present ; it has before it an urgent and defi- 
nite work and the largest inspiration for its accomplish- 
ment. When Christ indicated it as the primary petition 
of his disciples, that the Kingdom of God should come on 
earth, — a kingdom whose pervasive law is that of love, 
whose worship gathers men side by side, as they unite 
in saying : Our Father who art in heaven — he gave them 
the most distinct principles of development and the 
most comprehensive and constructive aim possible, — one, 
in every stage of pursuit, fitted to deepen and enrich the 
entire manhood. We see, indeed, in it abundant occasion 
for the passive virtues. The way is neither short nor 
easy, nor free from any kind of vexatious retardation. 
The disciples of truth must possess their souls in patience, 
must expect great things only as the product of great 
labors, must have their hold upon truth tried and deep- 
ened in every variety of way, and suffer the expulsion of 
partial views, narrow impulses, timid and ungenerous 
sentiments, by every variety of hard discipline. It is 
thus, and for this end, that patience becomes so noble a 
virtue, the power to bear the assay by which the gold of 
pure thought and gracious affections is set free. The 
impatience, the complaints, which are the vociferous off- 
spring of the desires, which assume that nothing is needed 
in the attainment of happiness save gifts of advantage 
which may better be conferred now than later, are re- 
placed by gentler incentives full of deep insight, coveting 
nothing before its time, willing to abide in a discipline 
which, without impoverishing the present, infinitely en- 
riches the future. 



INDIVIDUAL GROWTH. I35 

In no direction is the wisdom of the method of Christ 
more manifest than in his clear discernment that culture 
comes through worthy work worthily done, that the 
spiritual world is constructed on work, and that good 
work brings its own renovation. A training of this order 
takes place under the clearest, most practical, and best- 
sustained motives, lies most immediately in our every path, 
carries with it the greatest variety of experiences in our 
solution of the spiritual problem of our own lives and the 
life of the world, and sustains our strength at each stage 
of progress by a perennial overflow of feeling. 

A first condition of personal cultivation is a clear 
understanding that it aims at power more than at posses- 
sion ; that little, therefore, can be given to the aspirant ; 
that he is to covet only the conditions of trial and attain- 
ment, and be forever postponing the present and pursuing 
the future, yet so wisely postponing and so wisely pursu- 
ing that the full possession of the one and clear promise 
of the other are ever with him. There is a balance of char- 
acter to be sought in two directions : between the claims 
which spring from ourselves and those which spring from 
our fellow-men, and between the various claims which 
arise within us from our own varied powers. These bal- 
ances are not to be settled for us, but by us under our 
own insight. The convictions which shape the Kingdom 
of Heaven are not merely habits, but habits momentarily 
renovated and directed by our thoughts. 

In making up the harmony between the individual and 
the community, the former, as the weaker party, has often 
suffered from the latter, as the stronger one. The true 
solution of this relation does not lie in exaction or in 
defence on either side ; these are the make-shifts which 
attend on the struggle. It lies in distinctly seeing that 



136 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

society is for the individual, and that the individual is in 
turn for society. There is just now current a philosophy 
of social evolution which breaks down the organic de- 
pendence in behalf of the individual, as if he held within 
himself his own ends, and could in a measure reach them 
independently of society, asking of society only protection 
in the pursuit. This is a very insufficient solution of the 
great problem. The growth of our physical nature is by 
descent, with the accumulated gains of many generations. 
Our intellectual strength is equally the product of the 
past and present. We think with every man who thinks, 
and inquire with every one who inquires. Wise men are 
organs in the common life, and they fulfil their functions 
in that life because they themselves share it. Still more, 
if possible, are men one in spiritual relations. Our moral 
life lies in the lines of duty which unite us to our fellow- 
men. Here are our affections. There is not a man who 
does not, in the degree in which he touches us, alter for 
us our spiritual experience. If we ignore him, he still 
stands by our path to cast on us an evil eye of hate or 
reproach or repugnance. Indifference is the frost of our 
spiritual climate ; love, its warmth. Excellences in men 
are the light and beauty in our sky ; vices in men, its dark- 
ness and clouds. When we let men alone, it is simply 
because our vision is too narrow to include them ; when 
we draw near them and do not bless them, and are not 
blessed by them, it is because our life still suffers from 
disintegration and inner weakness. The true balance 
between man and society is that by which we freely give 
all, — subject to the laws of mutual profiting — and so are 
able as freely to take all. Our giving must not impover- 
ish or debase us, for that will impoverish and debase the 
gift also ; and in the gift we must find the fulness of our 



INDIVIDUAL GROWTH. 1 37 

personal life. Nor must the gift impoverish the receiver, 
for this again is its loss. We can not transcend in dis- 
tinctness the image of the apostle, under which we are all 
one body, and members one with another. Each organ is 
specialized for itself and for the body, by itself and with 
the body ; and no profitable division is here possible. 
The more complete the service it renders, the more com- 
plete that which it receives. So every step of individua- 
tion among men must open the way to a higher and more 
complete organization. The power and integrity we may 
have won only prepare us for more efficient and safe 
giving and receiving. 

Christ secures the first equipoise in life by uniting us to 
men in the most hearty and extended service. There can 
not be a Kingdom of Heaven save as it embraces men 
on these terms ; nor can we enter it save as we have 
suffered, point by point, the corrections which wickedness 
and weakness call for, and have won, point by point, the 
insights, sensibilities, and harmonized powers which con- 
stitute the dower of virtue. Spiritual life must lie between 
many pure hearts, and must be as comprehensive as 
its entire field, whatever that field may be. It can ac- 
cept, no more than the body, an interior division. The 
ocean feels at every point its remote surfaces and distant 
boundaries, though they remain far below the horizon. 
Under this form of discipline, Christ distinctly stated to 
his disciples that his was a gospel for all the earth. 

A second balance which we are to attain in self-cultiva- 
tion, and one in which men are more readily interested, is 
that of our own powers and impulses. This balance 
comes second in logical order. Until we understand the 
field of our powers and the law of their activity within 
that field, we shall not apprehend their true harmony. 



138 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

As that law is a moral law, and as morality lies between 
man and man, we must first determine our spiritual sur- 
roundings before we can settle the appropriate method of 
activity under them, and the relation of powers called for 
in our work. Not till we discover that there are impera- 
tive claims coming in on us from all sides, do we learn 
that in becoming the servants of the world we may also 
become its heirs. This is a part of the secret of Christ, 
and a secret open to us and yet hidden from us in many 
ways in our daily experience. The mother gains her 
wealth in her children by the labor she bestows upon 
them. What we have done in any spiritual enterprise is, 
as in an industrial undertaking, our plant in connection 
with it. An ascetic spirit, a fastidious spirit, a selfish 
spirit, must at once obscure every question of self-culti- 
vation. 

This relation of our lives to others imparts immediatel}'' 
clear light in the treatment of our own lives. One 
who overlooks exterior duties, or shakes them off in 
behalf of a more undisturbed development of his own 
powers, enters on a barren method of spiritual exhaustion. 
He acquires that of which he can make no satisfactory 
use; his ideal character falls out of relation to the spiritual 
world, and loses all fruitfulness within itself. Life is fruc- 
tified by life. Happiness arises from the relation of our 
sensibilities to our environment, and, in the long run, as 
the commanding element in that environment, from their 
relation to man. When we inquire, What is to be done in 
society, and what can we best do ? the problem of life is 
very much simplified, and the lines of cultivation in 
its primary features are laid down. The aid we can, from 
our powers and position, best render our fellow-men will 
disclose the discipline we need, and this discipline will, in 



INDIVIDUAL GROWTH. 1 39 

turn, in its reflex action upon us through the entire 
circuit of our spiritual constitution, do the most possible 
for us. Herein is a practical application of the principle, 
that we can not be wise without being good, nor good 
without being wise. Wisdom and goodness unfold to- 
gether, and must together be sought and attained. Not 
only are they mutually explanatory in reference to each 
other, they create by their interdependence immediate 
and successive claims, which maintain our lives in con- 
stant and pleasurable interplay. Goodness prompts the 
action and wisdom discloses the method. Wisdom di- 
rects the way and goodness rewards the effort. The 
adequacy of the motives and the adequacy of the means 
enable them to sustain each other. Culture is not so 
much the result of acquisition as of varied action ; is not 
so much statical, a poise of powers, as it is dynamical, 
a balance of forces in motion in reference to an end. 
Motion in the spiritual world, as in the physical, makes an 
equipoise easy and delightful, which can only be achieved 
with difficulty or not at all at rest. One sweeping along 
on a bicycle maintains a ready balance between conflict- 
ing forces, and quickly combines them for his own ends. 

Individual growth lies in a widening of vision, a corre- 
sponding deepening of feelings, and a ready direction 
and mastery of action ; lies in more intense unity of life 
with more scope of life. Old questions are answered 
and new ones are asked ; the mind uses and enjoys what 
it gains, and so makes ready for more. The pursuit by 
each one of an adequate object, the building on earth of 
the Kingdom of Heaven, gives mastery by uniting the in- 
ner and the outer life. We escape doubt and dogmatism 
as distressful conditions ; we slip between that pride and 
that humility which bring overthrow; the knowledge 



140 THE WORDS OF CHRIST.. 

which ends in imbecility and the ignorance which is 
imbecility we leave on either hand, and press forward 
toward the mark of the prize of our high calling in Christ 
Jesus — manful powers well trained in the kingdom of 
grace. 

This method of self-cultivation is at one with the laws 
of love and of consecration. We win life not by seeking 
it, but by devoting it. We start with the cross, we accept 
the sacrifice, we enter into eternal life. This method 
is at the farthest remove from a refined dilettanteism, 
and presents the sharpest contrasts with it in results. 
We may seem to have gained much less, but will, in fact, 
have won much more; and that in the degree in which we 
have understood and shared the spirit of Christ. This 
temper will never issue in that languor and profound dis- 
couragement which take away all incentives to effort, and 
hide its very direction. So far as this spirit is present 
there is health, and health accepts all labors and trusts 
all promises. 

We have, in the teachings of Christ, a philosophy of 
life, with its practical and working forces. Christ lays 
down as his method of self-cultivation, growth, under the 
discipline of the world, with the inspiration of the highest 
ideas, by action directed toward the well-being of men as 
expressed in the Kingdom of Heaven. What other, 
or safer, or fuller, way of life can we find than this? How 
can we avoid returning to this way after each digres- 
sion from it ? 



CHAPTER VIII. 
Social Growth. 

Individual life seems to present, and does present, a 
large field of secluded and personal activity. The sensi- 
tive nature at times is appalled by the absolute separation 
and isolation of its own experience. Close contact with 
men, habitual intercourse with friends, still leave the flow 
of the inner life unbroken. The hands that are stretched 
across this gulf are shadowy, and may at any moment be 
withdrawn. Or if one feeds on the senses, he is only pre- 
paring himself for a deeper and more hopeless experience 
of loss. One is alarmed at the solitude of his own 
spirit, at the many things that are to be thought, felt, 
and borne alone. Selfishness greatly enhances this soli- 
tude. The selfish man seems steadily to pluck up and 
cast out, as weeds from a garden, all sincere interest in 
others, and all partnership by others in his own life. 

Yet, if we look more broadly and closely at human life, 
we shall see that it is entirely impossible to separate the 
individual from the community, that the plane of activity 
for every one is assigned him by the community, that the 
rise and sinking of society is like the upheaval and depres- 
sion of a continent— it bears every thing with it. Even 
Simeon the Stylite, in all his despite of human things, 
would soon have climbed humbly down from his column, 
if his admiring fellow-men had all perished. The individ- 
ual is thus as strikingly dependent as he is independent ; 
and while he always reserves a kingdom for himself whose 

141 



M2 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

borders no man can pass, whose authority no man can 
usurp, the nature of that kingdom and the region in 
which it shall lie turn almost wholly on the collective 
history of man. Any words of instruction, therefore, 
which are to remain with men, must have application in 
both directions, inward toward personal life and outward 
toward common life. 

Though society, both in the formal laws which bind 
men together in the state, and in the more numerous 
though less formal customs and sentiments which guide 
and restrain them in the intercourse of the community, 
has reference to the common well-being, it has none the 
less sprung up through the incitements of individual in- 
terests, and been improved in the pursuit of them by 
the slow entrance of broader principles. The common 
welfare, extendedly conceived and distinctly sought, and 
individual interest, narrowly taken and deceptively fol- 
lowed, are thus the two extreme phases of impulse 
between which the growth of society takes place. It 
hardly lacks altogether, even in its lowest forms, the higher 
incentive ; and never, in its best forms, lays aside the in- 
ferior motive. The marvel of the world is, that individual 
interest poorly apprehended and wastefully pursued has 
borne men toward the goal of a social life, broadly illu- 
minated in its common rights and common possessions 
by principles both of justice and beneficence. 

If society originates in the need of protection, that pro- 
tection is not so much the result of general counsel as of 
individual strength, the pursuit by some one man of his 
own interests in providing for the safety of those more 
immediately useful to him and dependent on him. The 
love of power and sympathetic concession to power are so 
native to men, that they at once take the foreground as 



SOCIAL GROWTH. I43 

compared with any deliberate consideration by each and 
by all of their common interests. The fundamental con- 
ditions of order are deeper than the thoughts of men. 
Individual interests are so intrerwoven with the common 
interests as to drag them forward with themselves. The 
spiritual career of society lies in the slow transfer in posi- 
tion of these incentives, making the common welfare in- 
clude and bear onward individual advantage. 

In periods of general conflict so plainly is the individual 
dependent on the state for safety, that all influences con- 
cur to subordinate him to the state, and to put the state 
itself in the hands of those who can and will wield it with 
vigor. Safety is the first gift of society to man, and in 
early society safety means strength, and strength means 
subordination. It is not surprising that the Greeks and 
their greatest philosopher, Plato, should subordinate the 
individual to the state, the single organ to the great or- 
ganism, one of whose separate functions it was perform- 
ing. As long as pressure from without is the occasion of 
union quite as much as attraction and construction within, 
the code of war will prevail, and the citizen, like the sol- 
dier, must take the position and accept the dangers unhes- 
itatingly which the state assigns him. Nor is this unjust 
or unwise, for the citizen and the soldier are one, and 
must feel the presence of one absorbing claim. 

When this pressure is removed, or materially reduced, 
when safety is a matter of course, and the divided aims of 
individual life are pushing in all directions, quite another 
view takes possession of the thoughtful mind. The phil- 
osopher is no longer impressed simply with what the indi- 
vidual owes society, but also with what he suffers from 
society, the many ways in which his action is anticipated 
and thwarted by the state, the degree in which he is 



144 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

dwarfed by this overshadowing power. The danger most 
urgent, the interference nearest, are no longer those of 
enemies, but those of rulers ; and the question becomes, 
How shall the simple citizen'reserve himself and his own 
from the all-embracing and importunate claims and pro- 
visions of society ? Immediately there springs up the 
opposite theory : that the individual is the primitive seat 
of rights ; that the state is a voluntary organization whose 
function is the protection of these personal rights, and whose 
just powers are derived from its citizens. This doctrine 
as nearly disorganizes society as it possibly can, and from 
the oppressive unity of the past, we escape into the 
sporadic freedom of the present, — into extreme individ- 
uation. 

But this view, as the product of peculiar and transitional 
conditions, is no more ultimate than the previous one. 
When men contemplate the goal of human society, and 
the truly magnificent attainments open to the race collec- 
tively, they see at once that we have no less need of the 
conjoint strength of society, in the free combinations of 
all its members, than of the strength of each of them in- 
dividually. No resources are lightly to be thrown away ; 
nor, as we progress, to be deemed incompatible with the 
safety of individual rights. The individual will often, in 
the freest putting forth of his own powers, reach circum- 
stances in which he is so dependent on the conjoint action 
of those about him, that his own efforts will be greatly 
reduced in value, if there is no general organized method 
of sustaining them. The vice, the ignorance, the preju- 
dice of a few may undo or retard the social progress of 
many; and leave society the product of its poorest rather 
than of its best sentiment. It is the right of the thing right- 
eous that it should have free access to organic conditions. 



SOCIAL GROWTH. I45 

It would also be strange if the state, the representative of 
all, must forever remain in the attitude of a power to be 
distrusted, and limited in service ; and that, too, in the 
very degree of the freedom and virtue of its subjects. It 
can hardly be the true line of growth in liberty so to order 
the state that the more it can be trusted the less it shall be 
trusted, and the more disinterestedly it is able to act, the 
less it shall be allowed to act. 

The true doctrine would seem to be, that both society 
and the individual are to find co-extensive and concurrent 
lines of development, along which the aid they render 
each other will more and more hide the limitations they 
put upon each other. The state is for the individual, — the 
generic, the typical individual, the representative of every 
one within the state — and the individual can perfect his 
life only through the state. Society has no interests 
which it can wisely pursue aside from the individual, and 
the individual has no interests which he can either oppose 
to society or long follow without it. More and more, as 
we pass from the extreme of personal incentives forward 
to that of common interests, shall we find these two terms 
of our lives blended in all great achievements and all 
inclusive aims. 

In the first place there is no perfection possible to 
the individual except through and by the perfection of 
society. We need not refer to the appliances of civiliza- 
tion, and to the immense accumulations of knowledge, as 
directly conditioned on the common life ; we direct atten- 
tion simply to society as the true field, almost the only 
field, of spiritual sentiments, moral sentiments, and actions. 
Light is not more the medium of vision, than is society 
the governing element of our moral life. The breadth, 
the purity, and peaceful flow of the affections are not the 



146 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

results of one mind or one heart, but of all minds and all 
hearts that are embraced in them. The feelings are in- 
definitely mobile ; they spread, like an atmosphere, over 
all fields, contract every taint, and bear with them from 
remote places health or malaria, according as they meet 
with virtue or with vice in their passage. There is noth- 
ing so contagious as vice ; not always as vice, but as a de- 
vitalizing power, reductive of the moral tonic in the air of 
the spiritual world. No man can escape, no man does 
escape, this influence ; any more than the world can escape 
the heat that steals on from the equator, or the cold winds 
that come from polar ice. To be associated with vice, is 
to be profoundly injured by it ; to separate ourselves from 
vice is to reduce the injury by one degree only — the de- 
gree which falls to " good society " ; to contend against 
it is a further and greater gain ; to exterminate it and re- 
place it with virtue is alone fulness of life. Our moral 
atmosphere is the atmosphere of the world ; out of it we 
are breathing, into it all men are breathing, no matter 
how unwholesome the breath that comes from them. 
There can be no perfect man till all men are perfect, as 
there can be no pure place till all places are pure. Virtue 
alone gives scope to virtue, as wit exercises wit. We put, 
in our vices and faults, constant limitations on each other; 
as we all put so grave limitations on the grace of God 
that we do not know what it is. The loving fellowship of 
the flower-cup with the light is both the source and dis- 
closure of its exquisite tints. Life is found in the most 
extended and delicate reactions between itself and its 
conditions. 

The perfection also of the individual, such as it is, is 
gained only by clearly conceiving and laboring for the 
perfection of all. The moment this end is lost sight of, 



SOCIAL GROWTH. I47 

or loses its hold on the mind, that moment the spiritual 
nature misses its appropriate impulses, and drops off in 
activity. This is, as we have all along seen, the discipline 
of Christ, a direction of the vision outward to social ends, 
with the enforcement of zeal, patience, humility, hope, in 
their pursuit. A view of society, therefore, which makes 
it a safeguard to the individual, a fence of law about him 
while he seeks his own ends, is a fresh relegation of the 
mind to itself, and to those personal objects which have 
always brought with them so much mischief. When, on 
the other hand, the mind distinctly plans for the well-be- 
ing of others, both near and remote, it finds at once its 
own discipline in the reconciliation of all interests, and in 
their joint pursuit. Organization, not forced but free, be- 
comes the ruling idea, and society is made strong, not by 
the concentration of strength here and there, but by its 
diffusion and reciprocal ministrations. The body, in its 
divided functions but common life, remains the apt image 
of society in its unity and dependencies, ever extending 
outward and deepening inward. The individual, in his 
spiritual activity, is so much a part of the whole that he 
can attain to no perfection except in the precise duties 
assigned him by this very development. To transfer the 
centre of life to the individual is not only to break up the 
system of things of which he is a member, it entirely per- 
verts that intellectual and moral outlook, which defines 
the direction of his efforts, turns them into spiritual train- 
ing, and brings their spiritual reward. 

Again, the grand movement of progress, in which indi- 
viduals are made partakers, is strictly in and of itself a 
communal one, one that must proceed in the masses. 
Here is the bulk of physical human life, from which the 
life of each one is taken, and to which it is returned. 



148 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

The law of inheritance, as a regenerative power, is involved 
in this mass of life, and in its dissemination. For the best 
application of the laws of physical inheritance there can 
not be too many men, undergoing too great a variety of 
favoring conditions, and productive of too many types. 
Health and strength may rise to the surface anywhere, 
like a mermaid in the sea, from these manifold, subtile, 
interchangeable, and but partially calculable forces of life. 
No family, no class, no nation can be isolated, without 
ultimate loss in the reproductive powers which should 
invigorate it. The tentative and incipient movements of 
development should have their full range both in their own 
varieties and in the variety of their conditions, the superior 
everywhere displacing the inferior, and in turn giving oc- 
casion to that which is better. The element of diversity, 
multiplicity, endless involution, is an essential one in the 
problem of life. We all share the gains marked by those 
immense strides by which the growing points are trans- 
ferred from nation to nation and continent to continent. 

Nor are the conditions less communal by which we win, 
retain, and enlarge the terms of intellectual and spiritual 
strength. Science subserves but a partial purpose, and 
runs but a brief career, till it becomes appHed science ; and 
science is applied In the directions and for the uses that so- 
ciety requires. The ministrations of knowledge lie in physi- 
cal and mental refinement, and the fitness, completeness, 
and universality of this refinement it is which enrich society, 
enrich the individual, and give both the occasions and the 
motives for further effort. True refinement is something 
which the individual can never acquire by himself, nor en- 
joy by himself, and which suffers in quality as well as in 
quantity by every limitation. Snobbishness, as an exter- 
nal defect and as an internal disease, is the result of nar- 



SOCIAL GROWTH. I49 

rowness ; narrowness always entails this evil. Society can 
not be made pure and wholesome and stimulating by 
parts, any more than water is cleansed in divided sections. 
Motion is the one condition of purity. 

The communal character of our possessions is still more 
manifest in our moral life. This life is communal life ; 
the moral law stretches over all this common life, and 
lies between every one of its members. If there is any 
revolt of any portion of it, not only is morality so far 
limited, it is made correspondingly weaker everywhere. 
The law actually operative in the most of men, and in the 
best of men in the most of their actions, is that con- 
ventional law which pervades society. Manners, — a 
minor expression of morals — customs, the written and 
unwritten laws of the state, are the products of society 
itself in its organic activity, and no man can lift himself 
very much, or for very long, above them. His better 
theories and better methods must be made operative in 
society about him, before even he himself can receive 
their full benefit in his own thoughts and feelings. Theo- 
ries about virtue are something very different from the 
exercise of virtue in its own domain. The moral temper 
is a social temper, and in its ruling forces draws its inspi- 
ration from the entire body of society. Exclusiveness, in 
all its phases, is weakness ; and may easily be wicked- 
ness. 

While repudiating heartily the theory that morality is 
distinctively a social sentiment, begotten by social condi- 
tions, and without any independent enforcement in the 
individual, — a theory that makes society as society pro- 
ductive of new ideas — we still recognize the fact that the 
individual conscience must work its way into the common 
convictions, before it arrives at the force and sweep of a 



150 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

law. The community is the ultimate seat of efficient moral 
power. The individual needs, even for the maintenance 
of his own action when it concerns the many, the con- 
currence of the many, and society can build no customs 
and institutions on convictions that are not shared by 
a large part of those to whom they apply. The struggle 
which waits upon every man, and makes his life morally 
grand, is this very effort to incorporate his convictions 
with the code of society, and so to give them the force 
of law ; to make them a portion of that social and 
political vitality which engenders institutions, outlives 
customs, methods, special relations, moral sentiments, and 
accumulates the influences which enforce them. The in- 
dividual mind and conscience are the active organs of 
appropriation, but the processes of assimilation and in- 
corporation go on in the social body — the seat of social 
strength both for itself and for its several members. The 
common convictions of men are the repository of law, 
whence the individual in the long run must draw his 
supplies, more especially in the transition from generation 
to generation. This social sentiment in the moral world 
presents a fact of the same order as common law in the 
legal world, holding the first principles of law in a plastic 
form, shaping and reshaping its methods. 

This being the dependence of the individual on society, 
and of society on the individual, that social organism is 
perfect in its two leading products of laws and customs, 
in which all is ordered for the individual, and in w^iich 
every individual freely submits himself to the general 
strength. The general strength stands at once for the 
largest aggregate of life, and for the primary condition 
of all life. The individual can not in his activity afford 
to impoverish the state, another branch of that same 



SOCIAL GROWTH. 151 

activity ; nor the state to impoverish the individual, 
another phase of its own power. We are, therefore, to 
seek that combination in which each does the utmost 
in consistency with the full activity of the other. Nor 
are these two phases of action in any way so belligerent 
as to render such a union impossible. If we understand 
by an increase of liberty, an increase of powers, freely put 
forth and harmonized within themselves, then the just 
activity of the state is the liberty of the individual, as it 
enlarges the circle of his powers, actual and potential ; 
and the just activity of the individual is the liberty of the 
state, since it also is in increase of the joint powers of the 
state. These blended powers, no more than those of 
father and son, exist by exclusion, but by inclusion and 
joint increase. 

The typical individual is each individual in his generic 
qualities and relations. Incentives, conditions, rights, so 
far as dependent on customs and laws, are equal in each 
case, arising as they do from a common nature. What- 
ever limitations any one man suffers, or whatever peculiar 
powers he may possess, are personal characteristics, which 
the social construction neither gives nor takes away. 
Society recognizes them as facts, orders its own action 
in reference to them as facts, but does not accept them as 
fixed facts ; nor does it provide for them, as such, in its 
organic law. The law admits these changeable forces, 
but admits them as changeable, and in no way strives to 
fix them. Society may neither waste the variable powers 
of the individual by overlooking them, nor treat them as 
permanent differences, when they are not so. The char- 
acteristic of a high social organization is the utmost 
extension of the conditions of well-being, whether de- 
pendent on customs or laws ; the rendering of aid on the 



152 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

easiest and freest terms to all ; an habitual watchfulness 
over the general incentives to action ; mobility in the con- 
ditions which define classes ; ready terms of concession to 
individual endowments. 

With this general notion of society, which, if not fully 
definite at all points, contains no contradictory elements, 
and suffices to give direction to our thoughts, we ask, 
How do the words of Christ bear on those social problems 
which are pressing so hard on the minds of men for a safe 
and sufficient solution ? We are not to look here more 
than elsewhere for a continuous statement or exhaustive 
discussion of principles. The words of Christ are ad- 
dressed directly to the insight of men, and never assume 
the form of a system, established by proof, pursued into 
particulars, and to be accepted as a whole. They are 
fitted to awaken the mind at vital points, and enforce its 
attention, while leaving it to itself in instituting and com- 
pleting the appropriate lines of reflection and action. 
But principles that hold in them the essential truths of 
our social relations are not wanting In the Instructions of 
Christ. 

The economic relations of society are very fundamental, 
both as furnishing the conditions of a refined and purified 
life, and as giving, in the pursuit and distribution of 
wealth, a constant and common field of moral discipline. 
The words of Christ bear very definitely on economic 
principles. The twentieth chapter of Matthew opens 
with the parable of the house-holder, who hired ser- 
vants Into his vineyard at various hours during the 
day, from early morning to evening, and at the 
close of their work paid them each a penny. This 
parable touches directly questions of justice and of 
method in the dealings of men with each other, and in 



SOCIAL GROWTH. 1 53 

the dealings of God with men. It enforces, and seems 
primarily intended to enforce, individual ownership. Is 
it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? 
Ownership, sufficient and final, is the condition of benevo- 
lence, and so the condition of the unfolding of the spir- 
itual affections. Any claim that trespasses on this pri- 
mary right of the individual fatally impoverishes him, and 
in the end must impoverish the community. Nor are the 
economic losses greater than the spiritual losses. It is 
out of our own resources that our gifts must come. If 
these are taken from us, we lose all means of good-will. 
Nor is there any good-will expressed in that which is 
given under a claim. The laborers in the parable were 
angered by receiving less than they expected, and were 
not prepared to be pleased by receiving more than they 
could rightfully demand. When claims run ahead of jus- 
tice, they destroy the conditions of amicable relationship. 
The parable defines the limits of benevolence and justice, 
and does not allow the two by confusion to destroy each 
other. Friend, I do thee no wrong. Didst, thou not 
agree with me for a penny ? Take that thine is, and go 
thy way. I will give unto this last even as unto thee. If 
we undertake to displace benevolence by justice, we shall 
in the end lose justice also. The fundam^ental idea in 
justice, as well as in benevolence, is ownership. 

The parable also distinctly repudiates a notion of equal- 
ity as of the very nature of justice. Confusion of thought 
at this point was the occasion of the dissatisfaction of the 
laborers ; and it is this confusion which often lies at the 
basis of communism, and which is made the ground of 
complaint against the divine government of the world. 
Inequality may or may not express injustice ; the associa- 
tion is not a fixed one. It is very easy for those who 



154 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

seem to suffer from inequality to regard it as of the nature 
of injustice. There is a very general sentiment that the 
inequalities of society disclose either the wickedness of 
men or the injustice of God, and ought in some way to 
be corrected by civil law. The inequalities presented in 
the parable were clear and great ; some had labored twelve 
hours, and some one hour. The unfair division took place 
also in connection with severe labor, by those who had 
borne the heat and burden of the day, and who found 
themselves at night no better off than those who ha'd ac- 
cepted the light toil of the evening hour. The opposite 
principle, therefore, of constant inequalities in society, 
which do not in any way trespass on justice and are pro- 
ductive of well-being, is fully involved in the parable. 
While equality in claims is a fundamental principle, in- 
equality in gifts is equally fundamental. A world that 
did not yield the same rights to all persons under like 
conditions would be one of moral confusion ; a w^orld that 
aimed at universal equality would be fanciful and imprac- 
ticable, and repress every impulse of enterprise and good- 
wall. Justice simply involves the protection of rights and 
claims ; rights arise from powers seeking their own field 
of exercise, and claims from this very exercise of powers ; 
but powers themselves are subject to many degrees of 
inequality. The equality which is associated w4th justice 
is the equality of personalities. Justice is not permitted 
to weigh persons, but only to w^eigh rights and claims. 
The confusion in men's minds arises in part from the in- 
aptness of language. Equality is not of the essence of 
justice, but only equality before the law ; that is, equality 
or oneness of procedure in the law, and in the principles 
which guide it. Equality of powers is not a fact, and 
equality of conditions thus becomes a chimera ; so much 



SOCIAL GROWTH, 1 55 

SO that it implies a state of things not only unde- 
sirable, but in its details unintelligible. Justice, imper- 
sonality before the law, is the measure of our claims. 
Indeed, the two, personal inequalities and social equali- 
ties, resolve themselves into the one principle and 
its implications ; it is lawful for me to do what I will with 
my own. The inequality lies in the possessions and con- 
ditions which are my own ; the equality in the fact that 
I share the lawfulness which belongs to all men of using 
my own, and disposing of it at my pleasure. If each man 
has not an ultimate ownership in his powers and the fruits 
of those powers, then there is no one valid claim, no equal 
principle ; and if the one principle is not respected, then 
the diversity of powers is so far lost. The equality in the 
claims and the diversity in the powers are inseparable. 
Moreover, that which destroys one man's claim, destroys 
equally the claim which is brought against it. This para- 
ble is closed with a concise statement of the practical 
results of the truth recognized in it. The last shall be first, 
and the first last. Position must ultimately depend on 
the power to receive, rather than on what one has re- 
ceived ; on the freedom which we grant to the rights of 
others, rather than on the eagerness with which we seize 
our own rights. In abridging the work of others, we by 
so much abridge our own work. A little held fruitfully, 
that is receptively, is better than much held barrenly, 
unreceptively. 

The comparative indifference of the amount of the first 
gift appears in the two forms of the parable of the talents. 
In the one form, a single talent is given to each of two 
servants ; and in the other, one, two, and five talents are 
given to three servants respectively. Both forms are 
summed up in the same pregnant principle: For unto 



156 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

every one that hath shall be given, but from him that 
hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. 
It would be difficult to find a more important economic 
or social truth, or one more readily lost sight of in its 
application. The germ of growth is within us, in our own 
exertions. God gives to them that have — that is, to them 
who have the disposition to make use of what they have. 
This disposition is the one discriminating possession among 
men ; all motives are addressed to it, all hopes rest on it. 
It is not an alteration in position and circumstances that 
is to be sought for, but in the disposition to use them. 
As long as we look upon the discipline of the w^orld as 
hard and hopeless, it is certain to be profitless to us. 

This principle is thoroughly applied in the parable. 
He who had gained ten talents, as standing for the great- 
est activity, receives the talent which had been left idle. 
Possession passes from the lowest to the highest. Action 
is thus not only directly fruitful in itself, but indirectly 
draws to itself advantages and gifts. This tendency is 
fundamental in human society, and is not softened in the 
parable. Men must first look to themselves for help, and 
in so doing receive help from all quarters. This pro- 
ductive, economic law must be left operative in the con- 
struction of society. 

These gains, however, being made, there comes in a 
complementary moral principle, which the eager doctri- 
naire often forgets, but which receives the clearest state- 
ment by Christ : It is more blessed to give than to 
receive. Other principles are applicable for the sake of 
this principle, which springs out of the fulness of our 
spiritual affections. We seek our own so earnestly, we 
hold it so tenaciously, only that we may dispense it thus 
freely and wisely. We give to those who are able to 



SOCIAL GROWTH. 1 57 

receive, because the gift is thus made most effica- 
cious. Our own supreme benefit is found in the gift, and 
in the good it works. This principle is the crowning 
truth in the words of Christ, and one that men as yet by 
no means understand. Indeed, it is a truth that gathers 
hght only as it is broadly applied. We need to give more 
freely ; all need to give and receive more freely, more 
wisely, in order that the fruits of good-will may be ap- 
parent. This crowning truth in the instructions of Christ 
men are slowly approaching. They understand better the 
laws of acquisition in wealth than those of use. They 
stumble as they reach the goal. They can as yet hardly 
be said to believe that it is more blessed to give than to 
receive. The practical demonstration of the truth turns 
on the breadth and power of the spiritual affections as 
contrasted with the desires, and is thus necessarily de- 
fective in transitional stages ; as much so as the motives 
of civilization to a savage, entering reluctantly on its hard 
labors. The problem of making wealth is solved every 
day ; the problem of using it has only attained a theoretic 
exposition by Christ. Civilization has again and again 
shown itself a thrifty tree, till the period of fruiting has 
been approached, and then the too ungenial climate has 
blasted all the buds. 

Men have believed, and still believe, that wealth spent 
selfishly, or in a narrow circle, yields more pleasure than 
spent benevolently ; that they can not trust society, can 
not return to it what they have gained from it and find it 
again restored in full spiritual measure. They limit social 
organic force. Organs swollen by their own usufruct, 
they seem to think better than organs in active ministra- 
tion to the body. They surmount physical difficulties, 
they climb intellectual heights, but when they approach 



158 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

the very object to be gained, and have only to pitch their 
peaceful tents on the broad and beautiful uplands of our 
spiritual life, they hesitate, they fail to understand the 
new conditions, they insist that the advantages and 
disadvantages which have grown up in strife and selfish- 
ness shall remain. Thus they reach no moral eleva- 
tion, and means become means only in the ministration 
of passion. Power, wisdom, and grace are before them, 
and they tarry in power, believing that wisdom and grace 
are more or less a mistake. It is just here that the whole 
force of the Gospel is expended. 

This failure to take the highest social principle from the 
lips of Christ is seen in the very partial way in which it is 
applied, when men first turn to it. They may give, but 
give with so little wisdom and love, give in such antago- 
nism to lower principles, as quite to lose sight of the 
cardinal idea that giving is for the development of power. 
A love that seeks virtuous life will be saved from this 
error. Giving which is careless giving is not true giving, 
as it lacks the giving mind and heart, and can not bear 
either backward or forward, to giver or receiver, the 
beneficence of a gift. The giving which is more blessed 
than receiving is that which pours life into channels of 
life, and draws life freshly therefrom. To deny this 
aphorism of Christ, is to deny that society is organic 
throughout, as well in the higher spiritual realm as in the 
lower physical one ; is to believe that ultimate strength is 
to be sought by exclusion and limitation and not in 
the largeness of our common and divine life ; is to 
distrust the possibility of our becoming the sons of God. 

Severe things, some have thought inadmissible things, 
were spoken by Christ concerning riches, as If their 
possession were incompatible with the Kingdom of 



SOCIAL GROWTH. 1 59 

Heaven. This language is fully intelligible, if we under- 
stand it to refer to the spirit in which riches were then 
held, and are still so often held, as one that directly bars 
the kingdom of grace. In the development of our spirit- 
ual life, things are attacked, not so much according to 
intrinsic quaHty as according to their present relations to 
progress. The misconception of the spirit in which 
wealth should be used is one which turns piety into 
formal morality, and, taking from righteousness its love, 
leaves it to sink into rightfulness. Just here the column 
of advance wavers and falls back. The poor may be 
as selfish as the rich, as hostile therefore to the kingdom 
of grace ; but they can not put this selfishness in so 
conspicuous a position, they can not oppose it so directly 
to the next steps of progress. The rebuke must fall 
where the offence is most manifest. For this reason it 
was that Christ strove to help the young man from a 
formally correct mood into one spiritually powerful by 
bidding him : Sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, 
and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come and 
follow me. The claim was carried thus far that there 
might be no longer any opportunity of confusion and self- 
deception, any colliding of letter and spirit. It is just at 
this point of faith, a launching one's self unreservedly on 
higher incentives, as the eaglet takes the air, that the 
mind hesitates ; but this and this only is following Christ. 
While Christ puts clearly primary social principles, he as 
decidedly supplements them by spiritual ones. We are 
not brought to the gates of heaven, without the password 
of admission. 

Nor do the instructions of Christ fail at times to bear in 
the plainest way on civil government. Yet we are to re- 
member in the interpretation of his discourses, that he 



l6o THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

habitually abstains from a systematic statement of the 
principles applicable to any portion of our experience. 
It is not philosophy which he has in hand^ but life itself ; 
it is not to speculation but to action that he leads us. A 
system covers equally the principles in force among 
men, and those which are ready to be brought forward ; 
those which are sustained by self-interest, and those which 
appeal to our affections. A system must also not only 
give governing principles, but must carefully follow them 
out in their limitations. One who ministers to action, 
who calls out life by fresh spiritual impulses, a life that is 
to remain free, expansive, constructive, may pass in silence 
accepted truths and lines of action sufificiently well-en- 
forced, and call attention exclusively to new incentives of 
a higher order. Nor need he trace these to all their con- 
clusions, but may leave them in their own unfolding 
in experience to attain their true balance. A balance in 
action is a balance of the feelings as well as of the 
thoughts, and is by no means the product of simple specu- 
lation. Christ proposes a new life, and so brings forward 
with undivided attention the truths which are fitted 
to initiate it. If life is attained, it w^ill in due time 
and in suitable order make way for all other things ; if life 
is lost, truth will perish with it. 

Christ enforces service rendered, not service received, as 
the proper ground of authority and honor : Ye know that 
they which are accounted to rule over the Gentiles ex- 
ercise lordship over them ; and their great ones exercise 
authority upon them. But so shall it not be among you ; 
but whosoever shall be great among you shall be your 
minister ; and whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall 
be servant of all. This principle is so far from the 
practice of men, that they rule it out of their thoughts as 



SOCIAL GROWTH. l6l 

of a transcendental order. Yet it is plain that this spirit 
of service can alone contend with all evils, and establish 
for itself the proper limits of action. Wrongs and rights 
will right themselves under gracious impulses, seeking 
fitting expression ; ungracious impulses can never 
sufficiently, in their antagonism, fence each other off 
from mischief. 

The same principle receives a broader application in 
society. Honor is not to be sought by the disciples 
of Christ, but is to be left to fall freely to them in 
the simple sequence of right action : Be ye not called 
Rabbi ; for one is your master, even Christ ; and all ye 
are brethren. And call no man your father upon the earth ; 
for one is your Father, which is in heaven. Neither be 
ye called masters ; for one is your Master, even Christ. 
But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant. 
And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased ; and 
he that shall humble himself shall be exalted. This view 
of honor, the infirmity of great souls and the folly of 
little ones, is as philosophically correct as it is spiritually 
elevated. Honor can never be sought without missing 
its quality when attained. Honor is like the shadow^s of 
the human face when the light falls upon it from 
above ; they help to disclose the nobility of noble features. 

Another pungent principle presented by Christ, one 
quite in the teeth of ordinary practice and even of sedu- 
lously enforced sentiments among men, a principle that has 
its counter principle lying at the very foundations of 
government, is that w^hich pertains to the manner in 
which we are to encounter evil : Resist not evil ; but 
whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek turn 
to him the other also. Evil as a pervasive and malign 
fact among men is not to be overcome by evil. Satan is 



l62 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

not to be looked to to cast out Satan. Evil that is met 
by force, which is but another phase of the same evil, 
is suppressed, not vanquished. Evil is overcome by good 
only, is extinguished in its bitter passion by love only. 
The spirit of chivalry, which rufrled up so readily at 
offence, and was so quick in its irritability to inflict 
injury, was worth something as d. school of mere courage ; 
and yet disclosed the moral blindness of the period, and 
the great poverty of its conception of manhood. It 
maintained its inflated pride only by mistaking vices 
for virtues. It could not distinguish between patience 
which is the cowardice of a servile spirit, and patience 
which is the crowning strength of a noble one ; it 
could not contrast the choleric heat of self-love with the 
purified and quiet temper of love, and see where the 
balance of power lies. Virtue of this order overcomes 
vice, only as fire extinguishes fire, by a consumption of its 
material. 

It is true that force, backed by moral impulses of an 
impure order, is called on in government and elsewhere to 
encounter rampant evil, and secure a momentary lull ; but 
its effective power, if power it has, is found in the element 
of justice it contains, not in the wrath it expresses. Even 
in government, what truth do men more need to recognize 
than that the foundations of authority must be found in 
justice, and that justice must, in all its limits, lie side by 
side with love. Passion is the alloy of justice, not justice 
itself. The cruel penalties with which governments have 
sustained themselves have been made necessary by the 
injustice of their construction, and have given expression 
to an inhumanity which is of the very nature of crime. 
Men move slowly along the blind paths of force, only 
because they have not vision enough to detect the coming 



SOCIAL GROWTH. 1 63 

light. The wars by which states have built themselves up 
against each other have wrought immense suffering, and 
have so darkened the spiritual heavens that men have 
groped for the highway of morals at midday. What sense 
of justice could find admission to the minds of men Avhen 
Napoleon was driving North, South, East, West, through 
Europe like an enraged beast ? 

This principle, as stated by Christ, will have to some 
minds a tinge of fanaticism, first, because they may not 
have felt to the full the need of the principle, and second, 
because they have in their own minds imposed on the 
Great Teacher the duty of defining its limits. If for a 
moment we reflect on the degree in which this new temper 
of patience was the temper of Christ, how completely 
unknown it had hitherto been among men, how certainly 
and fully it must enter as a condition of regeneration, how 
sure it was to be misapprehended and unduly narrowed, 
how little men were yet ready to apprehend its proper 
limits, we shall understand, I think, that the ends of 
action, and ultimately those of instruction, called only for 
a vigorous enunciation of the principle of patience, as the 
supreme expression of moral power and the great remedial 
element in the conflict with sin. If we grasp this prin- 
ciple firmly, if we justly feel th'is just sentiment, all suitable 
limitations will be learned as they arise, slowly it may be 
but effectively. The present lesson is not to be lost or 
embarrassed by anticipating the next. 

The counter principle Christ does announce at another 
time : Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, 
neither cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample 
them under feet, and turn again and rend you. Moral 
means that can not be used as moral, are not to be wasted 
on physical forces. The supremacy of the moral element 
is to be asserted in a moral realm, and there only. 



164 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

Christ more frequently deals with social than with civil 
relations, as offering the broader field of action, one more 
truly expressive of the moral forces at work, and one ulti- 
mately productive, by. its own spirit and possibilities, of 
the more formal constructions of government. When 
thou makest a dinner or a supper, call not thy friends or 
thy brethren, neither thy kinsmen nor thy rich neighbors ; 
lest they also bid thee again, and a recompense be made 
thee. But w^hen thou makest a feast, call the poor, the 
maimed, the lame, the blind ; and thou shalt be blessed ; 
for they can not recompense thee ; for thou shalt be recom- 
pensed at the resurrection of the just. Christ here enjoins 
a generous, wdse, and considerate extension of social life ; 
a use of it not as a means of sustaining personal interests, 
but of promoting and completing the general well-being. 
The injunction is permeated with the idea that human life 
is common life, and that its social receptivities may lie be- 
tween all its members; that it is organic life, and can not 
attain its predetermined scope, if any divisive lines of self- 
interest enter in. Who, other than Christ, has so con- 
ceived society? And yet do not the mischiefs of society 
arise from the want of this conception ? What life is there 
less than the largest w^hich is worth as much as the largest ? 
And is not this question quite as applicable to that grand 
aggregate, human life, as to that inferior aggregate, indi- 
vidual life; to that major unit, society, as to that minor 
unit, the family? 

We may easily misunderstand these words of Christ, 
misled by the narrowness of the form of the injunction, 
and overlooking the breadth of its spirit. The instruc- 
tions of Christ make no effort to dispense with common 
sense, or with spiritual insight. When he washed the feet 
of his disciples, he did so as a single yet signal expression 



SOCIAL GROWTH. . 165 

of the most needful temper which he had occasion to in- 
culcate ; he thereby gave no color of approval to the carica- 
ture of this act of humble service by the most luxurious 
of his later disciples. This social parable, for so the evan- 
gelist speaks of it, lays hold at once of the primary and 
most tangible idea, that of a generous spirit, and enforces 
it against the old ungracious one which he saw manifested 
immediately about him. The error was that little dis- 
tinctions of honor were embittering men's hearts, and 
that social intercourse was neither sincere nor unselfish. 
The form had displaced the substance, the true spiritual 
force. We are not, therefore, to accept the correction in 
so literal a way as to repeat the same error on the oppo- 
site side, as if formal concession can ever take the place of 
real interest and generous sympathy. The thing con- 
tended for is a casting away of little things and personal 
things, and a corresponding broadening of the thoughts 
and affections which are the sufificient basis of a large life. 
It is a play of the higher nature that Is sought for, in place 
of a mean, deceitful, unwearied rehearsal of the selfish pas- 
sions. This purpose, society should be made to subserve. 
The candor with which our intercourse should be or- 
dered, is enforced in the injunction : Judge not that ye be 
not judged. The more artificial, correct, and exphcit so- 
ciety is, the more does it avenge itself for the restraints 
put upon it in pubhc by indulging in private a spiteful 
and malicious criticism. The fellowship that Christ con- 
templates is a spiritual one ; hence it is born in good-will, 
and grows up with a large participation by all in the gifts 
of God and grace of God, which we hold in common. 
When social life is built on the second command, and the 
second command rests back on the first command, we 
shall set no limits to the outward range of society any more 



1 66 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

than to its inner force. As in the ocean, breadth and 
depth will correspond. The condiments of this feast will 
no longer be vanity, pride, emulation, the love of honor. 

The illimitable movement of moral life is also clearly- 
put in the injunction of forgiveness. We are not to for- 
give until seven times, but until seventy times seven. 
The only obstruction to grace is transgression. As often 
as this is taken out of the way, life may be renewed, or 
rather is renewed. This conception of a clear, conscious 
life of divine love, rational within itself, and with 
deepest reason taking to itself, by sympathetic appropria- 
tion, all terms of life, and yielding all terms to life, is the 
dominant idea of Christ ; the Kingdom of Heaven for 
which he would have us labor and pray. And there is no 
other kingdom for man, no other goal of human life, no 
other suf^cient salvation for any human spirit. That this 
kingdom is attainable is shown by the simple fact that it 
lies on our visible horizon. 

The obstructions, dangers, delays, w^hich attend on this 
life ; the tenderness of the divine parental love which 
watches over it ; the blindness and wilfulness of the human 
impulses which, taking part in it, thwart it ; the slow dis- 
cipline, much to be deprecated and not to be escaped, 
which bears it forward; its final and joyful consummation, 
are all set forth in the simplest, clearest, and most divine 
fashion in the parable of the prodigal son, a complete 
gospel of wisdom and grace within itself. That such a 
parable in its promise should lie in the facts of this our 
world, should be seen by Christ and fall from his lips, dis- 
closes, on the one side, the germs of salvation that are 
hidden in the very soil of the earth, and, on the other, the 
divine sunshine and light of that Word of Truth that is to 
call them forth, and to put them in full possession of 
these their native fields. 



CHAPTER IX. 
Growth of Society Historically. 

Spiritual growth explains the rational world. If we 
omit this idea or weaken it, all interpretation becomes 
obscure ; the sufferings of men seem endless and hope- 
less. If we conceive this growth clearly, and give it that 
first position in our thoughts which it claims, immediately 
light begins to fall on the dark way men are travelling, 
and we come to see that the path, though long, leads out 
of a wilderness into a promised land. The Kingdom of 
Heaven is accessible only along the rugged road of spirit- 
ual discipline, but being attained in its commanding 
beauty it makes quite insignificant even this great labor 
of accomplishment. The direction of this growth, the 
means which have been used and which remain to be 
used in its fulfillment, must be somewhat known, if we 
are to understand the relation of Christ to its completion. 

We shall certainly find two things, even in a compara- 
tively hasty inquiry : first, that the chief evils men have 
suffered have been moral evils, and the remedy has neces- 
sarily been moral. Physical evils have been severe, intel- 
lectual limitations have been constant and great, but any 
effort to overcome them has disclosed the fact that back 
of them and beneath them, as a soil in which their roots 
were thriving, have been moral evils, which it was necessary 
to remove as a condition of any permanent improvement 
in the lot of men. Neither the physical nor the moral has 
long been handled separately successfully. The line of 

167 



l68 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

development, therefore, in society has from the very be- 
ginning included voluntary elements, and has shown the 
obscure and fitful movements which belong to spiritual 
powers. There have been frequent and encouraging 
gatherings of favorable impulses, which have borne par- 
ticular nations a great way onward in growth ; but these 
energies have subsided and been dispersed again long 
before any thing like a goal has been reached. It is also 
plain, in the second place, that the early stages of social 
growth are more instinctive and necessary, and the later 
ones more conscious and free ; and hence that the de- 
velopment of the race is not only one involving moral 
forces, but one in which moral forces increasingly assume 
the leadership. Hence it is that Christ, the incarnation 
of spiritual strength, becomes, century by centur}^, more 
manifestly the leader in this movement, provided for 
from the foundations of the world. If it is plain that 
this growth among men, now stretching back over many 
millenniums, can not complete itself except under this 
very leadership, we shall have the strongest proof, and 
the only sufficient proof, of his Messiahship. 

The formation of nations is the first considerable step 
in the growth of humanity. Physical necessities, social 
sentiments, intellectual impulses, all concur in securing it. 
Safety, the love of power, the fellowship which men, 
even the lowest, have with each other in the acquisition 
and exercise of power, give occasion to national growth, 
to an extended and strong social organism. The col- 
lective life takes the lead, and consolidates itself as the 
condition of all individual well-being. This stage of 
society has been termed its militant form. It involves 
firm cohesion, clear limits, sharp conflicts, and the stern 
subordination of individuals to the community. The 



GROWTH OF SOCIETY HISTORICALLY. 169 

active constructive agent is war, its constant arbitrament 
is war. 

That the intrinsically horrible circumstances of war, with 
its vast power to augment human sufferings, and its bitter 
expression of human passions, should be in any way the 
means of moral growth, is a fact that discloses fully the 
mixed elements we have to deal with, the slow and painful 
birth of the higher from the lower, the struggle which life 
is at once compelled to enter on with its environment as a 
condition of compacting its own powers. That war has 
wrought progress, and that war, men being what they are, 
has been a necessary means of progress, are plain facts. 
Yet war has suppressed human sympathies, called out 
brute appetites, and been everywhere and in every phase 
of it a startling manifestation of the cruelty and selfish- 
ness of men, — if not in all the combatants yet most in- 
tensely in the larger portion of them. Yet war has carved 
out the first grand organic forms in society and breathed 
into them national life. It has been a school of courage, 
duty, devotion. Count von Moltke is credited with say- 
ing : " Without war the world would stagnate and lose in 
materialism duty and self-sacrifice." While not overlook- 
ing the truth there is in this assertion, we ought not to 
overlook its profound error. War stands to social growth 
in something the same relation that sickness does to health. 
It indicates disease and helps to eliminate it ; and if suc- 
cessful is eliminated with it. War that subserves the pur- 
poses of war, to wit, progress, puts an end to war. No 
such clumsy and brutal method of change can long ac- 
company advantageous change. It is only the worst of 
circumstances that can be relieved by war. 

The courage that is called out is chiefly physical cour- 
age; and in the direction of this cardinal virtue of courage, 



I/O THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

war works quite as much by the physical means of natural 
selection as by those moral means which fortify the mind 
within itself.. The sense of duty also which war enforces 
is a very narrow one, and one of contradictions and blind 
limitations. As the heavy wheels of its own artillery rut 
the earth, so war cuts into the minds of men certain deep 
lines of duty ; outside of these the manifold obligations of 
men to men are wholly forgotten. The military roads 
that here and there cross the great steppes and wind 
through the m.ountains are no substitute for the innumer- 
able highways of communication along the fruitful plain ; 
no more is the hard muscle of war for all the gentle, pliant, 
patient activities of peace. A wave of lawlessness and 
crime followed with us the war of the Rebellion, and did 
not reach its full force till ten years after the close of that 
struggle. War may be a way of escape, but it is a passage 
of fire from a burning building. 

The second step of growth which accompanies and fol- 
lows the first step of combination is that of consolidation 
within the nation. Successful war without, gives more or 
less of peace within, the nation, and extended communica- 
tion and safety make way for the industrial phase of society. 
Moreover, this phase early becomes an adjunct of war, 
giving it its resources, and also those possessions for whose 
preservation and extension war is carried on. The spirit 
of war is compelled at once to foster that of peace in its 
industrial productiveness. But the second spirit is diverse 
from the first, and in development separates itself from it 
more and more. The objects which enlarged industry 
brings before the mind are constantly interfered with by 
war, and when industry accepts the service of war it is 
very largely at the cost of its own feelings and pursuits. 
The industrial phase of society springs out of the mili- 



GROWTH OF SOCIETY HISTORICALLY. 171 

tant phase, yet tends first to modify it, and then to 
displace it. Industry means production, commerce ; and 
these mean peace. It means also a restful enjoyment of 
the fruits of its own labors, and this desire war ruthlessly 
disregards ; war despises industry even while profiting by 
its labors, and industry hates war, looking upon its forced 
contributions as the exactions of an enemy. Hence in- 
dustry tends first to divide society into two classes, the 
productive class and the military class ; and later, if op- 
posing circumstances are not too imperious, to subordi- 
nate the second class to the first. 

The industrial period is also in its social tendencies di- 
verse from the militant period. The latter consolidates the 
nation with comparatively little specialization of individual 
powers, interests, and duties. The former is the reverse 
of this in its action. It quickens the development of in- 
dividual interests and of individual rights. Private enter- 
prise finds its own fields of activity, asserts itself in them, 
and strives to rescue them from the interference of 
government. The first necessity of society lies in the di- 
rection of organization, and its first theory of rights is in 
the same direction. Society is a supreme need, and also 
is it a supreme right. The second necessity and the sec- 
ond disclosure of rights lie in the opposite direction, and 
the individual comes to be regarded as the primitive seat 
of authority, while the state holds from him what author- 
ity he, in the pursuit of his own interests, has conceded 
to it. In the militant period there is a central life which 
makes a very simple organization effective, and gives to 
personal liberty but a narrow range of activities. It is 
not embarrassed with any theory of rights, but identifies 
them at once with force. In the industrial period there is 
an extended division of functions and powers, which ren- 



172 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

ders society, in its various members, capable of much ; but 
also one which easily weakens its organic unity. In mak- 
ing this assertion we must direct attention to the results 
of industrial interests simply, which draw rights, powers, 
pleasures, toward the individual in his private activity. We 
must not forget that this stage of development gives occa- 
sion to a third stage, and may be, therefore, partially ob- 
scured by the action of spiritual impulses higher than its 
own. 

What we now wish to urge is that the industrial phase 
is no more complete within itself, is no more ultimate, 
than the militant one ; that the two, as opposed tenden- 
cies, must unite, as a condition of progress, in a movement 
higher than either. If the industrial stage is left to itself, 
it will destroy itself in its own excessive individuation, and 
society will be forced back again on the militant phase as 
a means of regaining its strength — the one grand feature 
of this development. When individual power has been 
won, that power must return itself freely to society under 
the moral law as a condition of its ultimate retention. 
The central life must expand proportionately to that of 
its members, must tower up and overshadow the life 
of its parts ; or rather must gather up into itself 
from its members, and must send freshly forth from itself 
to its members, those common currents of health and 
strength for the sake of which only does specialization 
take place anywhere. The primary dependence is that 
of the individual on society; the secondary dependence is 
that of society on the individual. Each, in transition, is 
instituted narrowly for itself; but each must ultimately 
recognize and embrace the other under the law of the 
affections. If society halts in its development at any par- 
tial attainments, it is soon forced back on some previous 
position to do over again its incomplete work. 



GROWTH OF SOCIETY HISTORICALLY. 1 73 

We have In hand to show the weakness of the present 
industrial stage of society, and the possibihty of advancing 
beyond it by the spirit of love only, the Gospel of Christ. 
The coming of Christ would seem to have been ordered 
in time in reference to these successive phases, and to have 
occurred at the earliest period in which any new principles 
could take root amid the conflicting forces of war and the 
unrestrained selfishness of production. The repeated 
failures of the past render plain the insufficiency of either 
war or industry to build up a nation in permanent pros- 
perity. The progress achieved by the race has not been 
made in straight lines, but in zig-zags, as lightning forces 
its way in the air. Resistance has accumulated in one 
path, till farther advance has been impossible ; and there 
has been a pause till the movement has been taken up in 
some new direction. Men have begun to conclude that a 
circumscribed life belongs, from the nature of things, to 
nations as to individuals, and that all organic growth is 
discontinuous, its genetic transitions being its most favor- 
able and striking features. The actual occasion of the 
arrest of social growth from time to time in the past has 
been the unwillingness of men to advance from the indus- 
trial to the spiritual phase. Society has expended its en- 
ergies under the industrial type, till this movement has 
become self-destructive. Roman power began to perish 
within itself before it began to crumble away under ex- 
ternal forces. This inner weakness was due to the curd- 
ling of social elements under a purely selfish system. 
Classes became more widely separated, were more Intensely 
hostile, and were enervated by wealth on the one side, 
and by poverty on the other. Here were the rich men 
who fared sumptuously every day, and here the beggars, 
full of pollution, who were laid at their doors. Neither 



174 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

of them could win manhood for themselves or bring 
strength to society. 

The conditions of national life have been somewhat 
altered by the permanent division of nations, and the 
general extension of civilization. There is now no area 
left in which barbarous and hostile powers can be nurt- 
ured, and no ability in inferior civilization to resist superior 
civilization. Exterior pressure is so far reduced by this 
fact, or rendered so amenable to public opinion, that the 
precise method of overthrow which is liable to overtake 
a state weak by decay is less obvious. But this much is 
plain, that the simply industrial spirit tends constantly to 
deeply divide classes and to weaken social ties, and is, 
therefore, hostile to the continuous growth and prosperity 
of the state. Arrest and overthrow will follow, whether 
we are able or not to anticipate its precise method, or to 
point out the successive steps in which internal decay and 
external violence will unite in the result. India and China 
and Japan have presented examples of a civilization hope- 
lessly balked by the poverty of the working-classes. In 
European nations the disaster may come as communism, 
since communism gains an ever-growing incentive out of 
the increasingly unequal rewards of industry. Or, one 
nation may engulf another ; as it is plain that a civiliza- 
tion which cannot secure common development for its 
citizens, or bind them by a sense of justice to the existing 
state of things, cannot long impose any sufficient moral 
restraint on simple violence. We can not escape the liabil- 
ity of an unexpected appeal to force, so long as a full and 
fair appeal to good-will has not been made. It is vain to 
suppose that the selfishness of the few will not, in due 
time, and in some inevitable way, be met by the selfishness 
and violence of the many. Even within the present cen- 



GROWTH OF SOCIETY HISTORICALLY. 1 75 

tuty, all portions of Europe have suffered by devastation ; 
the most civihzed nation playing the part of a barbaric 
horde led by an Alaric. 

Though the repeated failures of the past have some- 
what the force of inductive proof against continuous 
civilization, this conviction would be readily overcome did 
we not clearly see that an industrial type, built upon the 
desires and so upon the appetites and passions of men, is 
within itself full of increasingly repellent forces, which 
must ultimately find expression in a disaster of some sort. 
The century just finished has contained a complete re- 
hearsal of this law on a large scale. Slavery in the United 
States, in that century, passed through all the phases of 
censure, tolerance, justification, stern maintenance, each 
prompted in due order by an industrial sentiment and in- 
dustrial incentives. Yet the conditions of a terrible, and, 
in spite of all prediction, unexpected retribution were ac- 
cumulated in that one centuiy, and broke upon us in such 
terrific force that another century will hardly more than 
suffice to wear out the penalty. Industry simply — politi- 
cal economy w^ithout ethics — rests on our selfish impulses, 
and in the operation of all its laws, gives power to those 
who have power, and so widens the divisions between 
men. This it does in its later stages with startling rapidity, 
a rapidity so great that the world is not rich enough for a 
continuous movement in this direction, any more than it 
was large enough for the conquests of Alexander. There 
are not sufficient resources of labor in the poor to glut the 
appetite for wealth, and the process is arrested by the 
sifnple exhaustion of extreme poverty. This industrial 
tendency may be softened and delayed by various 
measures of good-will, but it contains within itself the 
certain promise of catastrophe. 



17^ THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

To give to those who have is an important and broad 
moral principle, but if we narrow it down into an economic 
or social law, as some are willing to do, it plays only a sub- 
ordinate and unsafe part. We may begin with it, but we 
can not end with it. If we refuse to expand this principle 
to its full limits under the divine law of love, and simply 
cling to the rule that each man shall hold what natural 
forces, expressed under the social facts of free competition, 
assign him, we shall discover that we are approaching a 
final and not very remote bound of individual and of gen- 
eral well-being. This result is hidden from thoughtful 
minds, first, because they overlook the fact that the affec- 
tions are constantly breaking in on the industrial desires, 
and soften them when they can not control them ; and, 
secondly, because they clearly see the vigorous and need- 
ful discipline of natural laAvs, the many ways in which 
society has suffered from hasty and awkward efforts to 
escape them, and do not so distinctly discern the lines 
along which these lower laws must always, in a truly 
spiritual economy, be merged in higher ones. We can not 
accept the statements of those who look upon society as 
a field of laws, in their nature and severity allied to 
physical laws, and who thus anticipate its redemption, so 
far as it is capable of redemption, from the' continued 
pressure of these forces. "All that we can affirm with 
certainty is that social phenomena are subject to law, and 
that natural laws of the social order are in their entire 
character like the laws of physics." " Every successful 
effort to widen the power of man over nature is a real vic- 
tory over poverty, vice, and misery, taking things in the 
general and in the long run. It would be hard to find a 
single instance of a direct assault by positive effort upon 
poverty, vice, and misery, which has not either failed, or, 



GROWTH OF SOCIETY HISTORICALLY. I// 

if it has not failed directly and entirely, has not entailed 
other evils greater than the one which it has removed. 
The only two things which really tell on the welfare of 
man on earth, are hard work and self-denial {i. e.^ in tech- 
nical language, labor and capital), and these tell most 
when they are brought to bear directly upon the effort to 
earn an honest living, to accumulate capital, to bring up a 
family of children to be industrious and self-denying in 
their turn." ^ 

This is the gospel of industry, the inspired canon of 
Political Economy. The error it contains is not less in 
magnitude than the truth it holds. It regards a transient 
phase — which must be, if it is to be of any use, a trans- 
itional one — as the permanent form of society. It discards 
higher forces because they are not at once or fully appli- 
cable to lower conditions ; and that too in face of the 
most significant facts of our time. No assertion concern- 
ing society could well be made more profoundly untrue 
and misleading than that every direct assault upon poverty, 
vice, and misery has miscarried. We have only to in- 
stance the educational institutions of other countries, and 
yet more those of our own country, to disclose the rash- 
ness of the assertion. These institutions almost univer- 
sally include, and that usually in a high degree, a moral 
and eleemosynary element, and their success has been 
more than proportioned to the generous effort they have 
involved. There are very few in the United States who 
have acquired any considerable education, to say nothing 
of a liberal one, who have not been aided therein either 
by private or public liberality. One can hardly gain with 
us the knowledge which helps to entitle his opinions to 

* Sociology, Princeton Review, Nov., 1881. 



178 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

respect without being compelled, In the censure he may 
pass upon benevolent effort, to stand as an illustration of 
the opposite principle. 

Industry as industry is thoroughly selfish. It involves 
a perpetual division of interests, and a desertion of the 
poor by the rich so far as their own gains, narrowly 
viewed, will allow it. As industry so ordered aims not 
so much at any thing that can be termed absolutely well- 
being, as at relative superiority in the external circum- 
stances of life, poverty and degradation may remain in 
entire consistency with its purpose, while ready and 
humble service may be a part of it. Every inferior class 
gives relief and advantage to every superior one. Superi- 
ority is present by contrast, and pliancy is the fruit of 
necessity. Industrial laws, natural though they are, 
gather power rapidly, in their development, into the hands 
of the few, and a power of the most searching, exacting, 
and irremediable order. If wealth can be left to an unre- 
stricted use of all the conditions of acquisition which easily 
and in due succession fall to it ; if poverty is to be left to 
the entire weight of the growing disadvantages which 
overtake it ; if civil law stands by as an indifferent umpire 
in the conflict, simply preserving that peace which is neces- 
sary for its progress, then no bondage and no hopelessness 
are comparable to that slavery and despair which are 
liable to overtake the working classes under a simply in- 
dustrial system. We may theoretically affirm that there 
are thus present immense forces of propulsion, developing 
industry and economy, but they lack almost wholly that one 
element which makes them effective social forces — hopeful- 
ness. " In an over-populated country the extremes of 
wealth and luxury are presented side by side with the ex- 
tremes of poverty and distress. They are equally the prod- 



GROWTH OF SOCIETY HISTORICALLY. 1 79 

ucts of natural social pressure. The achievements of 
power are highest, the rewards of prudence, energy, enter- 
prise, foresight, sagacity, and all other industrial virtues 
are greatest ; on the other hand, the penalties of folly, 
weakness, error, and vice are most terrible. Pauperism, 
prostitution, and crime are the attendants of a state of 
society in which science, art, and literature reach the high- 
est development." ^ 

After this vigorous statement of the evils which attend 
on the natural unfolding of an industrial system, the 
author has no remedy beyond that of an increase of 
speed, a still more remorseless application of the very 
principles under which the mischief has arisen. Over- 
population, in Its entire entail of misery, is simply an- 
other incentive, pushing men onward into a position 
of foresight and broader moral responsibility. This 
is the only remedy of over-population. The term is 
relative, and expresses a life disproportionate to the in- 
tellectual, and still more the moral, resources of a nation. 
It is simply the crowding of physical forces upon spiritual 
powers. Nothing is to be feared from over-population 
when the moral impulses have the lead ; In this lead lies 
the remedy. 

If there is any one truth that has come clearly out In 
the history of the race, it is that progress is never secured 
by the simple addition of gross motives. Flogging as a 
punishment does not improve character. Cruel Inflictions 
do not redeem society. Wretchedness does not correct 
vice. The sufferings of barbarians do not civilize them. 
The final and sufficient incentives must come, like a flock 
of doves out of heaven, in gentleness and in beauty. 



^ Idem. 



l80 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

When the intelHgence and strength and virtue of a com- 
munity are found forgetful of its ignorance and weakness 
and wickedness; when the better classes desert the in- 
ferior ones, and attempt to march on alone, the poor, in 
their grovelling qualities, will only the more basely betray 
themselves ; and the rich, in their selfish ones, will fall off 
from true greatness and substantial well-being. 

The industrial method thoroughly recognizes self- 
interest, — tmdistinguished from selfishness — and relics on 
it as a prevailing prudential incentive. The indulgences 
of wealth are as much a part of the programme as the 
privations of poverty. The one is the pull and the other 
the push of the same movement. If we deny the luxury 
we lose the one impulse ; if we alleviate the misery we 
lose the other. It is for the sake of these enjoyments 
that men exercise their sagacity. A Derby race, with its 
five thousand dollars paid to the jockey that rides the 
successful horse, is a typical force that moves the world. 
A right-hand corner-stone in the social structure is the 
luxury of the luxurious ; a left-hand corner-stone is the 
wretchedness of the wretched. These, again, are the two 
pillars on which our temple rests ; and unfortunately there 
is a blind giant of force standing between them, with an 
arm wrapped about each ; we can not tell when he will 
bow himself and bring our revel to an end. Certainly 
these laws of industry, which are of the nature of physical 
laws, have no power to assuage grief, call out sympathy, 
or placate passion. It has been in this very mill of in- 
dustry that our giant has been grinding, till his mind is full 
of sullen hate. 

This notion of the unchangeabllity of the forces that 
rule in any social phase proceeds on a false view of the 
moral world. The author referred to regrets that sod- 



GROWTH OF SOCIETY HISTORICALLY. l8l 

ology has been included in moral science, and been " con- 
fused and entangled by its dogmas." Herein is the bold 
assumption that society is not the field of morals, and that 
sociology, the science of social forces, should be ordered 
without reference to man's moral nature. On the other 
hand we venture to think that the chief difficulty in so- 
ciety has been and is that its action is ordered without 
sufficient reference to morals, and that the correction of 
its evils lies in the growth of the moral sentiment. Mor- 
ality, as social law, means this much or it means very 
little. The only possible organic harmony in a spiritual 
universe must arise under the two laws of love ; the only 
possible harmony in society must appear under the second 
of those laws. This statement is hardly less than axiomatic. 
Where there is not mutual regard, there is not moral or- 
ganization ; there are forces still in conflict, and these 
must reduce happiness and impede growth. Moreover, the 
affections are constitutionally the very seat and source of 
our highest and most enduring pleasures, and we cannot 
mar these affections, or put any thing in their place, with- 
out corresponding loss. The pure, generous, and hearty 
nature is the permanently happy one ; and this is an irre- 
versible law in the moral universe. But the industrial 
phase of society strives to set aside this law by a law of its 
own. The force of gravity may as well contend for ex- 
clusive control of the human body as the law of self-inter- 
est for the entire government of the human soul. Happi- 
ness is annexed and forever annexed to the gracious affec- 
tions, and this is a fact that cannot for a moment be 
forgotten in a successful sociology. It is profoundly 
better, in every way better, to give than to receive ; and 
the practical denial of the fact in industrial society shows 
the error and bondage still in it. 



1 82 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

We do not set aside the industrial regimen ; we cordially 
assent to the fact that we must grow through it and by 
means of it. No man can be generous till he has won 
that which is his own. The mistake is that when he has 
won it, he insists that an unscrupulous and selfish con- 
sumption of it is the best cousumption, the very consump- 
tion he has had in view from the beginning, the only in- 
centive of his labor. When the mind is in the midway 
ground between lower and higher motives, it suffers from 
a variety of attractions and illusions. A revel of the pas- 
sions, hard labor for the desires, the sweet intercourse of 
the affections, all draw it ; and it does not find its true 
centre till it approaches the goal. The refinements of so- 
ciety are felt to be valuable, and so they are. The indus- 
trial temper, when it is brought near enough to the 
spiritual temper to feel the need of self-justification in its 
forgetful and selfish methods, is likely to set it up in this 
wise. Refinements are the staples of civilization, its most 
manifest gains ; they must be preserved at all hazards ; 
the divisions in society serve to fence them off and fence 
them in from that vulgar herd which grazes on the open 
common, and which, once admitted, would trample these 
plants under foot, without gain to themselves, and to our 
infinite loss. Here is an important plea, and the indus- 
trial temper makes the most of it. 

There is another supplementary truth, which it sees less 
clearly. These refinements, while they are in some sense 
the products of seclusion, suffer immensely from it. 
They are like a garden which has not only been fenced 
in, but roofed in, till the sunlight of heaven can not reach 
it, and bring forward its plants to flowering and fruitage. 
Our satirical writers have discovered this fact ; and we 
ourselves have framed words on purpose to express these 



GROWTH OF SOCIETY HISTORICALLY. 1 83 

phases of society. The refinements of wealth, when not 
sustained by intellectual cultivation, we term shoddy ; 
the refinements of cultivated society which are not sus- 
tained by good-will, we term snobbishness. How searching 
and bitter and just is the satire of Thackeray, and against 
what is it all directed but the refinements of an industrial 
system in its later stages ; refinements that are not 
bedded in the moral life, offer no sufficient pleasures, and 
give no inner strength ; refinements that have been roofed 
in from the pure light of heaven, and have contracted the 
pallor of disease. Even these refinements can not be 
long preserved on these narrow conditions. They are 
perishable fruits, and must in time decay ; or rather they 
are in a state of chronic decay. As the refinements of 
wealth must at once be supported by cultivation, so those 
of cultivation must be immediately sustained and ex- 
tended by good-will. These refinements are in part what 
industry gets to give, and forgetting to give them, they 
perish on her hands. No miser can ever be blessed by 
his gains. It was with a perfect insight into this inner 
weakness of mere luxury, in its ever-returning and futile 
efforts, that Christ commanded his disciples : When thou 
makest a dinner or supper, call not thy friends nor thy 
brethren, neither thy kinsmen nor thy rich neighbors, lest 
they also bid thee again, and a recompense be made thee. 
But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, 
the lame, the blind, and thou shalt be blessed, for they 
can not recompense thee. He then proceeds to the para- 
ble of the great supper, — the true blessing — from which 
one and another excuses himself on the ground of this 
and that narrow private interest. No one craves a part 
in the festivity of love. 

It may seem surprising that, in the highest stage of de- 



1 84 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

velopment which the industrial type has ever attained, 
and among its well-to-do classes, the question is so vigor- 
ously put : Is life worth living? and is so often answered 
in a pessimistic spirit. Yet it is not strange. Disappoint- 
ment is the most depressing feeling. It extinguishes 
light, it destroys hope, it tramples out the fire and en- 
thusiasm of effort. But the industrial system as it reaches 
its goal discerns more and more clearly that the objects 
gained are of no new worth, that it has been the victim of 
a mirage that leaves its thirst unquenched. Whither shall 
it go ? What shall it now do ? Whence is to come a 
new promise and a fresh labor? These are questions it 
can not answer ; and without an answer life is not worth 
living. 

Yet the answer is plain, if we freely accept our higher, 
spiritual nature. Industry has not miscarried, life is not 
ended. So far as there has been an apparent miscarriage, 
it has been because we have taken means for ends. If 
society were any happier than it is, that happiness, in the 
present selfishness of men, would be an accusation against 
Heaven, and would obscure the path of progress. As 
long as men and women really prefer that play of sensi- 
bilities which attends on the possession of diamonds to 
that which accompanies an extended exercise of good- 
will toward other men and women, the happiness of the 
world can not be materially increased ; nor ought it to be. 
There is no basis for such increase. Selfishness has run 
itself out of breath, and love will not come in to take up 
the race. To vary the image, we are landed on a farther 
shore, we have reached a new carrying-place; only by 
making this neck of land, can we launch our boats on fresh 

waters. 

But the excuse is ready. Direct assaults on vice and 



GROWTH OF SOCIETY HISTORICALLY. 1 8$ 

misery have lamentably failed. Doubtless they have 
in part failed, because they have not been thoroughly 
sustained by wisdom and inspired by love. Love that 
is' careless and heedless is by so much less than 
love. Love is not off-hand in its work, it carries with it 
the utmost patience and attainable skill. Now skill, 
patience, and love have not failed ; on the other hand, all 
the social successes of the world are due to them in their 
minor and major forms of application. Indeed the latter 
forms are of the two less often complete, and so we are 
confused and misled by the results. Skill and good-will 
more readily run between man and man, than between 
class and class ; they pass more perfectly by slight methods 
than by great manifestations; but in either case, when 
they are present, they do not fail to do their work, and 
a great work. As long as we give in the spirit of self- 
indulgent wealth, satirized by Horace: "Take these things 
home to your children ; if you do not, I shall give them 
to the pigs," we have not tested the force of good-will 
in the world. Its failures hitherto have been the failures 
of incipiency, not those of maturity. What seer, in view 
of the facts of history as they pass before him, is afraid to 
predict the fortunes of good-will, provided it be good-will 
fortifying itself with the appliances of wisdom. 

It is plain that men are becoming aware, and more and 
more completely so every day, of the present and pros- 
pective failure of mere industrialism. Many have already 
at hand their remedies in some form of communism or 
socialism. That communism is often the search for a truth, 
and even the partial expression of a truth, that lies be- 
fore us, one may be quite willing to admit ; yet the spirit 
and methods of both these '' isms " are usually retrogressive. 
A communism that has in it any disposition to confisca- 



l86 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

tlon, any desire arbitrarily to redivide the fruits of past 
labor, is in antagonism to the forces which rule industry, 
and is seeking to escape existing evils by retreat and not 
by advance. Such a movement involves a misunderstand- 
ing of the problem. A communism of this order does not 
see that the strongest incentives out of which the laws of 
production spring, have not been too strong for the v/ork 
they have had to do, and that they can only be advan- 
tageously and permanently softened by struggling up 
through them and not by sinking beneath them. If we 
do these laws essential violence by arbitrary redivision, we 
shall soon find ourselves in a position in which we shall be 
compelled to restore them in full force as a condition of 
regaining lost ground. If we can supplement self-interest 
with good-will, very well ; but if we propose to expel one 
form of self-interest by another form of self-interest much 
less justifiable and not less exacting ; if we put the self- 
interest of the less intelligent classes in place of the self- 
interest of the more intelligent, we shall certainly fail, and 
be compelled to restore the more primitive and natural 
relations of men to each other. Government that is truly 
progressive is coherent in its successive steps; still more 
are the laws of society coherent in their unfolding, and 
any accumulation of pressure indicates an occasion for 
progress, not for retreat. 

In the present conflict between labor and capital, the 
wrong involved in existing circumstances is strongly felt 
by the working classes. They understand this much, that 
current relations can not be, must not be, accepted as ulti- 
mate ; that they are in some way to have a brighter future ; 
that toil is to lighten its burdens as it progresses. In the 
restlessness begotten by hard labor, and by the just senti- 
ment that they too should share the growth of the world, 



GROWTH OF SOCIETY HISTORICALLY. 18/ 

they are ready for any sudden and violent change that 
makes promise of being remedial. The proper counsel, 
under the circumstances, to workingmen, is not patience 
and submission, but wise effort. This counsel must include 
a plain path forward along the lines of unfolding that be- 
long to our higher nature. The naked enforcement of 
laws of sociology, which are only the harsh rendering of 
impulses based on self-interest, a self-interest that has 
taken sides with the rich against the poor, is fitted only to 
enflame and embitter passion. Those who are below can not 
be successfully exhorted to lie quiet for the sake of those 
that are above, nor will they willingly believe that there 
is any satisfactory and just law that holds them in their 
place. It is not now true, and will become less and less 
true with every advancing year, that society, in its founda- 
tions and superstructure, is built simply on self-interest. 
It is true, and must remain true, that without first sustain- 
ing the laws of self-interest, we can not reach those of be- 
nevolence. But having established production, we must 
make it minister more and more to good-will, a good-will 
that constantly softens the conditions of production itself. 
We can not supersede justice by benevolence, we may 
greatly modify it by benevolence. 

A true communistic movement must be rooted in the 
concessions of good-will, must spring freely up under the 
laws of our higher nature, those very laws that make these 
progressive unfoldings expressions of profound truths, chief 
among which is. It is more blessed to give than to receive. 
In the measure in which the individual understands that 
the community is after all the grand reservoir of personal 
powers in the physical, the intellectual, and the moral 
world ; that personal well-being can be gotten in no other 
way so fully, so fortunately, and of so high an order, as by 



1 88 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

a free and constant contribution to the common life, will 
uninterrupted progress be possible in those later stages in 
which it enters the true moral domain. 

For more than two thousand years it has been distinctly 
seen — and it is a truth that in the meantime has found 
many practical enforcements — that in all free or proxi- 
mately free governments, the great struggle lies between 
the rich and the poor. So to reconcile and organize these 
two extremes that the inner forces of society shall be 
attractive and not divisive, organic and not destructive, is 
the great problem of social life. 

Liberty and democracy, said Aristotle, can not exist 
without equality of conditions. Equality before the 
law that issues in gross social inequalities ceases to 
have the force and even the appearance of a great prin- 
ciple. This social and civil conflict between the rich and 
the poor is one that is coming, with each advancing year, 
to touch us as a nation more nearly, and to hold in itself 
more manifestly the future of the republic. Society and 
civil law can not long be divided in their temper. If the 
possession of wealth defines social relations and social 
power, it must come in time to govern civil ones also. 
The greater contains the less. 

Some have thought that the true remedy for this con- 
flict is a return in the tenure of land to the primitive 
method of common ownership, with yearly division. 
This view overlooks many things. It overlooks the fact 
that states and societies do not move backward. Growth 
does not return to previous conditions. The forces of 
individuation have been sufficient, in most instances, to 
overthrow this tenure ; much more will they be sufficient 
to prevent its re-establishment. This opinion does not 
sufficiently consider the fact that a common tenure of 



GROWTH OF SOCIETY HISTORICALLY. 1 89 

land is applicable to an agricultural population only, and 
to one relatively stationary in civilization and in numbers ; 
while the great evils of modern society chiefly develop 
themselves in cities, and cities are gaining increased social 
weight as contrasted with rural districts. This view also 
forgets that modern civilization can afford neither to 
spare, nor to materially reduce, that personal energy and 
enterprise, that increased life, which have accompanied 
individuation. There is no general principle which will 
justify regression at this essential point. The true solu- 
tion of the social problem is a husbandry of these awak- 
ened powers and a subjection of them to the general 
well-being. Their repression would be a pitiable confes- 
sion of weakness. Progress must quicken personal 
activity and extend personal responsibility, checking 
them only at the line at which they begin to trespass on 
the action of others, and so to undermine themselves. 

Those who look backward rather than forward for the 
remedy in this conflict fail also to see the anomalous 
moral attitude in which they are ready to place society. 
Rarely will one tie his own hands lest he should commit 
a crime, or fill his ears with wax lest he should hear the 
Syren of temptation. Still less will society do this. Men 
will not peacefully lay aside great and valuable powers 
lest they should abuse them ; nor will society as a whole 
enter on such a method. The moral strength sufficient to 
lead to such a measure ought to lead, and would lead, to 
something far better than it. 

Moreover, counsels of this extreme order are wasted. 
Society will accept no heroic treatment, will yield itself 
to no man's panacea ; its stages of growth will not be 
the long strides of theory, but the short, tentative steps 
of experience. It is of comparatively little use to con- 



190 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

struct complicated theories, or theories which involve 
extensive changes, for the reorganization of society. 
Society will hardly give them so much as a hearing; and 
the boldness, the rashness of the spirit which would lead 
to their adoption would augur poorly for their mainten- 
ance. 

Society will, doubtless, in reaction against excessive in- 
dividuation — an individuation that tends to anarchy — and 
pressed by urgent dangers, learn both in theory and in prac- 
tice to assert more vigorously its own superior rights. It 
may set limits to individual acquisition, especially in landed 
property ; it may restrict the amounts which it will pass 
from the dead to the living in inheritance, — a measure 
that would rapidly reduce excessive wealth ; it may com- 
pel wealth to bear its full arithmetical proportion of the 
public burdens, — which it now so generally and so exten- 
sively evades — or a geometrical proportion, which would 
serve to compensate the extravagant power of accumu- 
lation which falls to great possessions. The right of 
society in this direction will be recognized in connection 
with the circumstances which call for its use. He who 
holds millions and transmits millions almost without 
effort ; he who easily and safely gathers into his own 
hands the best opportunities of a great commercial com- 
munity, is able to do so by virtue of that pervasive 
presence of civil law which the state maintains. It is for 
this same state, as a wise and just presence, to decide in 
what method, to what extent, and at what price, guided 
by the public w^eal, it will cast this protection over in- 
dividual wealth ; how far it will aid the individual in 
gathering in the conditions of advantage which it itself 
confers. The incentives to effort which society needs 
carefully to guard are chiefly found in connection with 



GROWTH OF SOCIETY HISTORICALLY. I91 

poverty and with moderate wealth ; they exist in excess 
rather than in deficiency in connection with extreme 
wealth. 

One thing is plain, a happy, social organization will be 
a free and a highly moral one. The pressure of present 
dangers are the very incentives which are to bear us for- 
ward through the next stages of progress, lifting our 
moral level. No perfect organization is consistent with 
selfishness, or can be the product of selfishness. Society 
must be organized within itself by the possession of a 
liberal and beneficent spirit, the spirit of Christ, and by 
giving this spirit constructive force as rapidly as it is 
gained. Only thus can we escape one phase or another of 
conflict. Most true is the assertion of Immanuel H. Fichte, 
that Christianity is " destined some day to become the in- 
ner organizing power of the state." The social spirit and 
civil law will grow together, and together struggle against 
the spirit of division and anarchy, and win their victory 
only by a slow infusion of the mind of Christ. 

But these transitions are already incipient, and the 
forces that are to make them complete are in action. 
Hence the question of social progress is not one of general 
principles simply, but one of specific applications also. 
General and extended education at the cost of society has 
probably been thus far the most effective social agency in 
growth, and is one which still admits of a far more perfect 
and complete use. Knowledge is a primary condition of 
skilful and successful action ; and if it be true knowledge, 
it supplies also the most immediate incentives to such ac- 
tion. No one who believes in the steady and general devel- 
opment of human life, will expect this result without 
knowledge. One of the most direct and certain ways in 
which society can use its strength for its conjoint interests 



192 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

is education, improved in quality and increased in quan- 
tity. Any effort that reaches any mind as knowledge, 
attains that which in itself is good, and can only be turned 
into evil by perversion. The more extended the knowl- 
edge the less become the motives for its abuse. It is 
urged against education that it is often not well adapted 
to the particular and immediate ends of life. Quite true ; 
and the remedy lies in a more careful adaptation. Or it 
is said, that knowledge does not necessarily improve char- 
acter ; that character is a thing of incentives and habits. 
If this be affirmed of some forms of knowledge, it is true ; 
but it is not true of knowledge widely or w^isely taught. 
This gives us the range alike of physical, intellectual, 
social, and spiritual laws. The motives and methods of 
virtue are also themselves proper subjects of that large 
discipline which is covered by education. Occasionally it 
has been said that there are more convictions for crime in 
well-educated than in ignorant communities. It is pos- 
sible ; where there is no law there is no transgression. 
All the reasons urged against education betray their origin 
in indifference, by the simple fact that no good man thinks 
them applicable in the case of his own children. 

While the essential forces and laws of industry are not 
to be set aside, they can be constantly softened and re- 
shaped for ends of equalization. The increasing power 
which wealth acquires by the very growth of society, the 
excessive stimulus which it occasions on the one side, and 
the bitter repression on the other, can only be corrected 
by social sentiment and civil law. Social laws are not in- 
flexible, neither is all legislation in modification of them 
mischievous. The very injury ascribed to these measures 
must arise from a modification effected by them in social 
action. The true statement is that great caution and wis- 



GROWTH OF SOCIETY HISTORICALLY. 1 93 

dom afe called for when we deal with primitive social ten- 
dencies, that our new methods may lie in the general 
direction of their social action, and be in continuation of 
it. Social laws are modifiable, and are suffering constant 
modification in the progress of society. This fact arises 
from their very nature. They rest on motives, incentives 
in the human mind, and these incentives are variable un- 
der social progress. Action and growth change the data 
from which the laws spring, and so change the laws them- 
selves. These changes may be made successfully of set 
purpose, as well as by insensible transformations. 

The conditions under which real estate is to be held are 
wholly within the scope of law. They may be altered 
again and again in the further equalization of incentives 
and opportunities. The pull and the push in society, the 
rewards of labor and the losses of indolence, need constant 
rearrangement as they gather too intensely at poles too 
remote from each other. Otherwise the advancing host 
has no common spirit ; all is eagerness in the front, all is 
indifference in the rear, and an unscrupulous sentiment is 
everywhere. The excessive pull of wealth and the in- 
effectual push of poverty land men alike in vice. Educa- 
tion can not do much unless social sentiment and civil law 
keep the highways of individual progress clear, by a con- 
stant reduction on the one side, and restitution on the 
other, of incentives. That tenure and division and trans- 
fer of real estate are best which, the circumstances being 
given, confer the strongest and most general motives of 
industry. Between strength and generality, generality is 
to receive the first attention. 

Monopolies of every form, whether legal or natural or 
incidental to the simple growth of industry, are to be re- 
moved or softened, according to the principles involved 



194 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

under the general end of the general well-being. In short, 
society is to have a brain and a heart, with which to watch 
over its own growth, remembering, in the spirit of Christ, 
that it has but one interest, one life, one redemption ; 
that the weak are committed to the strong, the ignorant 
to the wise, under the law of love. 

That the state can do this, and has been doing it in a 
limited way in the progress already achieved, are very 
plain. Public education is an example ; the use of public in- 
stitutions as depositories of the savings of the poor is an 
example ; national banks in the security they have brought 
to industry are examples ; the many charities of the state 
and its milder penal administration are examples still 
waiting completion. Though these have not been ad- 
ministered with that uniform wisdom which would make 
them entirely satisfactory instances of what society can do 
for itself, they are none the less among the best illustrations 
of progress. A reactionary spirit — reactionary against 
the tyranny of the past — has of late years striven to cut 
down the state to its lowest possible terms of protection, 
and to cast discredit on every positive effort on the part of 
the state to render direct aid to its citizens. The com- 
bined action of men in the state expresses an immense 
power. When society is sufficiently advanced to use this 
power for its own advantage, nothing can, or should, pre- 
vent its use. The plea against it is individual liberty, 
but this is also the plea for it. Joint liberty or powder 
wisely used will resolve itself at once into an increase of 
individual liberty or power. There is no ultimate antago- 
nism between the state and the individual, between joint 
power and single power, but the possibility rather of com- 
bining them in the highest harmony. They are reciprocal, 
they minister to each other, they depend on each other. 



GROWTH OF SOCIETY HISTORICALLY. I95 

To sacrifice one is to sacrifice the other ; the discord is 
ill-advised and transient, the concord well-advised and per- 
manent. The state in the progress of society will do more 
than it now does, not less, for its citizens, simply because 
it is the seat of great reserved power, a power which helps 
the power of individuals. When that power becomes 
subject to a wise and humane sentiment it can not with- 
hold itself, it can not be withheld, from a humane work. 
The opposite view springs from the bad blood that is 
found in the relations of man to man, and man to society, 
is found in conditions of vice and not of virtue. As vice 
disappears, powers will coalesce and harmonize ; the indi- 
vidual will find his strength in and by society, and society 
its strength in and by the individual. This is organiza- 
tion, and nothing short of it is organization. The state 
may thus take to itself any interests that are either burdened 
with too great labors or attended with too great gains to 
be left to the individual. The state in what it does, in 
what it gives and takes, will stand for all its citizens. This 
is the direction of actual growth, and this is the spirit of 
Christ. 

There is, however, an organic force far more pervasive 
and effective than that of the state, one of which the state 
is only a partial expression, social sentiment. When so- 
cial sentiment is infused with moral life and moral love, a 
life and a love as broad and inclusive as its own body, 
it will begin to take care of its own members in a tender 
and effective way. Toward this we are steadily advan- 
cing, and this means the love of our neighbor as ourselves. 
In this path Christ is before us. He, in word, example, 
and revelation, is the way, the truth and the life. Men 
speak as if there were a kind of salvation in the mere din of 
industrial wheels, and pressure of industrial forces. This is 



196 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

such a salvation as we find in China and Japan. More 
pressure of this order is like that of steam ; it tends only 
to explosion. As a tempered force in an engine, with a 
perpetual vent in the open air, steam may drag its load 
onward with immense power. The moral realm of hope 
and life is the open air into which industry must perpetu- 
ally discharge its pent up energies as a condition of prog- 
ress. This air of heaven Christ discloses to us. All the 
struggling forces of ignorance, vice, selfishness, and misery 
are worth nothing as propelling powers, without this free 
realm of hope above them. 

The feeling of the need of unity is the one great im- 
pulse which lies at the basis of all great movements in 
society, true or false. It builds empires, and weaves 
together the commerce of the world. Missing its aim, in 
the chagrin of failure, it would take all to pieces again, and 
reconstruct the parts as republicanism or communism or 
socialism. 

The Church has had this feeling, and that too when it 
has been least able to meet this innate desire for unity. 
It has termed itself the Universal Church, the Historical 
Church, the Apostolic Church, the Holy Catholic Church. 
When men have lost faith in Christ, they have not lost 
the vision of unity. Lessing dreamed that it might be 
won by a kind of free-masonry ; Comte set up in its be- 
half a worship of humanity ; Frederic Harrison accepts 
the synthesis of humanity as an absorbing passion and 
hope. The only path to this spiritual goal is the one in 
which Christ walks before us. 

Why then, has not the Christian Church attained this 
end ? We reason hastily concerning the failures of relig- 
ion, as if religion in the abstract were chargeable with 
them, and not we ourselves, who have interpreted and 



GROWTH OF SOCIETY HISTORICALLY. 1 97 

applied it. It is not the essential and incipient impulses 
of religion that are at fault, but the limitations and re- 
tardations that have been put upon them. Science is not 
the errors of scientific men, nor philosophy the mistakes 
of philosophers, nor civil liberty the aberrations of free 
states ; no more is religion the credulities and misdeeds of 
faith. Every great truth or system of truths struggles 
with the conditions of its birth, and comes but slowly into 
possession of its own life. The end can not be the be- 
ginning, and preeminently, when the aim is so inclusive as 
to call for repeated reconstruction under a protracted 
series of actions and reactions. 

Periods of belief are naturally succeeded by periods of un- 
belief, which arise in correction of the too narrow formulae 
and too fixed methods of belief. Religion is the heir of 
all, and profits by all. In saying this we are not to con- 
found the perfection of the end with the awkwardness and 
defect of the intervening means. The means do not, in 
their particular form, derive their character from the end, 
but from the obdurate and untoward circumstances about 
them. Chaos and creation are separated by every stage of 
inchoate production. Religion in its dogmas and institu- 
tions is never fully itself. Its creeds suffer all the narrow- 
ness of ignorance, and its institutions are shaped to tran- 
sient and more or less unfortunate circumstances. To 
hold fast by a doctrine, to adhere to a rite, to rally to an 
organization, is to accept the husk of the seed, often with 
the loss of the seed itself. 

We can distinctly affirm from the very nature of the 
problem that men can not advance collectively and indi- 
vidually, save by the principles and methods brought fully 
to light in Christ ; we can as distinctly affirm that men 
have advanced in the past centuries, and are advancing in 



198 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

the present century, by a partial and hesitating application 
of these very principles. It is, therefore, both a fact of 
philosophy and of experience, that Christ is the way and 
the truth and the life. 

The ultimate coalescence and harmony of all elements 
of growth must be found in a community permeated 
through and through with these same spiritual principles 
which find their only complete expression in the life and 
teachings of Christ. All religious, all moral agencies 
expend themselves on, and are treasured in, social senti- 
ment. This is the pervasive protoplasm of general and of 
individual life. Into this the truth of all beliefs, the 
virtue of all faiths, the piety of all churches must pass. 
From this come the constructive and beneficent forces of 
the state, and largely the impulses which govern each 
individual within the state. This is the vital atmosphere 
which sustains the daily respiration of spiritual life ; and 
the oxygen of this air must be and will be the words of 
Christ, as expounded by the spirit of Christ. They assert 
this relation and this ofifice for themselves by their 
intrinsic character, by their present hold on the hearts 
and actions of men, and by their power to push their way 
among all races and all generations of the human house- 
hold. If these principles are not the root of salvation, 
then salvation is not yet in the world, nor is it yet an 
intelligible hope. 



CHAPTER X. 

The Natural and the Supernatural. 

The intellectual clearness and the moral warmth of the 
words of Christ, which make them the light of the world, 
would be more readily discerned and cordially accepted 
by some minds were it not for the supernatural events 
with which they are associated. These have occasioned in 
them a cautious and sceptical temper, which has served to 
dim the personality of Christ with doubts and suspicions 
that would not otherwise have arisen. While they may 
fully acknowledge the excellency of his teachings, they 
regard his life as a medley of contradictions, and so lose 
that pure personal presence from which alone this wisdom 
and grace can properly proceed. 

In consistency with our plan, we enter into no details ; 
we find no occasion to defend either this or that miracle ; 
we wish only to show that the overshadowing force of the 
supernatural which is in the words of Christ, and in the 
narrative of the events which accompanied them, is not 
present in abatement of their power, but as a thoroughly 
harmonious and fitting accompaniment of it. We regard 
these supernatural events as threads of gold in the fabric 
of truth, and we do not understand how they can be 
drawn without destroying the firmness and marring the 
beauty of the texture. We see, or think we see, that 
the peculiar lustre of the perfect work is due in no small 
part to these same assertions and implications of a life 

199 



20O THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

inwrought in many ways and in new ways with divine 
power. 

We are as hearty and unreserved in the .acceptance of 
the supernatural as others are in its rejection. Some 
think that if the hfe of Christ could be wholly freed from 
the supernatural, his teachings would immediately gain 
greatly increased force. " The miracle in the sense of the 
thorough-going and consistent supernaturalist, the only 
miracle that can prove a revelation supernatural, is, we are 
obliged to say, impossible." These multiplied impos- 
sibihties of the Gospels thus put a heavy burden on the 
sober truths that travel with them. 

We, on the other hand, feel as distinctly that if Christ 
had separated himself from the supernatural, and striven 
to build up the faith of his disciples on the natural alone, 
he would have betrayed hopeless weakness, and his words 
would have gained little or no hold on the spiritual w^orld. 
While we do not think that the miraculous element in the 
life of Christ is any essential part of its intrinsic power, 
we do regard it as a natural, inevitable incident of that 
power, and one of its methods of disclosure ; we do re- 
gard it as that which his life could not have lacked with- 
out being crippled, as that which his teachings must have 
laid hold of and held in some form in order to reach the 
high, free, and supernatural nature of man. Christ did 
stand where every great teacher of morals must stand, at 
the point of union between the natural and the super- 
natural, appealing freely to both, a master of both. Re- 
ligion without the supernatural in some form is not 
religion. Religion everywhere and in every way must as- 
sume the supernatural. The two ideas are inextricably 
interwoven. Religion pertains to our relation to the divine, 
and the divine is supernatural. To expel the supernatural 



THE NATURAL AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 201 

is to expel the divine. This connection is not a weakness of 
rehgion, something to be deprecated by its servants ; it is 
its own peculiar power. If Christ had not stood at this very 
centre of vision, with the brilliancy of the supernatural 
full upon him, he would have gained slight possession of 
the minds or hearts of men. Virtue is as sympathetic 
with the supernatural as is the diamond with light. It 
can not reveal itself as virtue save in this pure atmosphere. 
The difficulty at this point seems to arise from the con- 
fusion and partial paralysis that have overtaken our intel- 
lectual and critical vision. While we have no desire to 
insist on the need of any one miracle, we do believe that 
the supernatural, for which miracles stand, is the ineffable 
element in which all holy life revels; and this too in full 
harmony with the natural, and in most peaceful and 
permanent submission to it. The two as fully and as 
easily supplement each other as do the body and the 
spirit in man. 

The great gain of supernaturalism is not the miracle, 
but the entirely different view which the miracle may 
lead us to take of daily events. Nature ceases to be pur- 
poseless, passionless, impersonal, and throbs in every part 
with divine thought and feeling. It is this which makes 
it an immediate inspiration, a divine presence, the con- 
stant revelation of God. It is this conception, in which 
nature correlates with mind, that we wish to attain, and 
with this conception the supernatural is in eternal har- 
mony. The natural without the supernatural is the body 
of a friend, bereft of the spirit, cold, motionless, infinitely 
removed. 

By the natural we understand all those things which 
have received a nature absolutely fixed in its terms and 
relations. This nature expresses itself in properties — 



202 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

settled forms of action — and in movements. No matter 
what the quahties or what the changes through which any 
constituent in nature, as water, may pass, the circuit is a 
closed circuit, a defined orbit ; and the elements involved, in 
definite amount, are somewhere to be found in it every mo- 
ment. The physical world in its entire relations may thus be 
likened to the solar system, whose internal dependencies 
are constantly altered, but whose bulk of being, balance 
of forces, and continuity of movement are forever main- 
tained. The ordinary expression for this great fact of 
nature — of the natural world — is the perpetuity of matter 
and energy. Fixedness, even quite beyond our knowledge, 
is the one thing insisted on, and that too under ever- 
changing appearances. Forms are infinitely variable, but 
between these forms there remains the same relation of 
equality, when rightly contemplated, as between the shift- 
ing terms of an equation deftly handled. It follows from 
this view that within the circuit of the material world all 
events, in their character and in their order of sequence, 
are defined, and these definitions are what we mean by 
physical laws. That this is one term of the universe we 
are all agreed. 

By the supernatural we understand, as the word Implies, 
energies or powers which are lifted above the plane of 
forces expressed in matter; which constitute no part of 
these forces, and are not subject to their laws, except so 
far as the higher agents work with the lower instruments. 
These powers are those of reason. They do not exist in 
definite quantity, nor do they act in closed circuits, nor 
do their movements follow each other under fixed laws — 
that is, laws which admit no variety in results. In all these 
respects the powers of reason are supernatural ; they have 
not a final nature given them, foreclosing all issues. By 



THE NATURAL AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 203 

their own activity they can apprehend, and in a measure 
direct, the physical forces that He beneath them. Thus 
below and above, natural and supernatural, become words 
figuratively applicable to matter and to mind. 

This firm coherence of things, to Avhich time brings 
changes, but no new terms and no new directions ; this 
spontaneity of reason, which occupies time with its own 
growing purposes, we would make the essential character- 
istics of the natural and of the supernatural. The two 
are known as the physical and the spiritual worlds. The 
only possibility of confusion here is in regarding the 
action of the human mind within itself and in matter as 
natural, because there is a fixed term and limit present in 
this action in the human body, itself material and subject 
to material laws. We have here the mystery of inter- 
action, but this mystery does not alter the endowments 
respectively of matter and of mind, the two terms in the 
interaction. That a uniform and well-known provision is 
made in the body of man for this intercommunication 
does not make the nature of mind natural, in the sense of 
allying it to physical forces. It makes it natural in this 
sense only, that nature, as a comprehensive term, may be 
used to include both mind and matter, and the conditions 
of their relation. This comprehensive use, however, ought 
not to confuse the mind, nor be made the means of hiding 
fundamental differences. The use which is pertinent to 
this discussion is one by which the necessary is separated 
from the free, the closed circuit from the open circuit, the 
action without comprehension from the one with it ; the 
movement which marks forces in transition from that 
which expresses incipient powers. This is a distinction so 
basal that the world can not be understood without it ; it 
is the proper boundary line between the natural and the 



204 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

supernatural. In a most significant sense human life is 
full of the supernatural, and stands on equal terms with it 
and the natural. All other distinctions in forces and 
powers are quite secondary to this distinction. 

The formal conditions of these two classes of actions 
are quite distinct. One set of events occurs in space, the 
other in consciousness. Forces and powers are incom- 
mensurate with each other. Forces have definite locality, 
and admit of definite measurement in foot-pounds. 
Powers are without locality, and allow of no estimate in 
terms of force. Forces are in no way cognizant of their 
own action ; powers carry with them a spiritual presence 
conscious of their putting forth, and so may be guided by 
it. The laws of the two are wholly distinct. The one 
set is physical and causal, the other intellectual and free. 
This diversity of law marks a corresponding diversity of 
character. 

A large part of the difficulty which attends on this dis- 
cussion arises just here. The mind is struck, as well it 
may be, with the idea of law. The supernatural, as often 
conceived, is regarded as lawless, and so is thought to 
exist in limitation or overthrow of reason. This would 
be true were not the supernatural under law of its own 
higher order. Physical laws are not exhaustive of law or 
of reason ; they do not even attain to the highest type of 
either. A miracle that modifies the action of physical 
forces may as much arise under a higher spiritual law, as 
does the virtuous action of man when he accomplishes a 
beneficent purpose through the ministration of nature. 
It is forgotten that law is of many orders, related within 
themselves by a supreme reason. Nothing is irrational in 
law which submits law to reason ; every thing* is irra- 
tional in law which asserts law against reason. Reason is 
ultimate, not law. 



THE NATURAL AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 20$ 

But it will at once be said the miracle stands on a dif- 
ferent footing from the supernatural, even if we accept the 
supernatural as now defined. This is true formally, but 
not substantially. The benevolent labor may be said to 
be man's supernatural action, and the miracle God*s super- 
natural action. When the variable element finds its way 
among fixed physical elements by the presence of man, 
we are able to recognize the conditions under which this 
takes place ; when it finds its way thither by the inter- 
vention of God, we are not able to discern any special 
media, nor have w^e any right to assume their existence. 
But what does this signify more than saying that God can 
work his purposes immediately in matter, and is not 
bound to a medium like man. Every act of God is in its 
ultimate nature miraculous, one as much so as another. 
To make law and to modify law, to create and to recreate, 
imply precisely the same power. The miraculous act is 
intensely like the natural act, lying in the same field, and 
implying the same range of government. 

Here is no conflict in reason, and no ground for distinc- 
tion, between the miraculous and the supernatural, but the 
reverse rather. The miracle is rationally an event of the 
same order as the virtuous action ; the difference between 
them is one only of the inevitable relations of the two 
agents, God and man, the Infinite and the finite, to nature. 
That the two interactions stand connected in a different 
way with human experience is plain ; but we are not of 
the number of those who expect to find the comprehend- 
ing ideas of experience in experience itself, as a sense- 
product. We quite understand that from beginning to 
end we reach the Invisible by forsaking the visible, by 
making it a grand point of departure for an inference 
which the mind alone can justify. We have not yet 



206 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

reached the folly of setting up a ladder as a means of 
climbing to heaven. 

But is there not an intrinsic irrationality in a miracle 
viewed as the act of God ? Quite the reverse. The forces 
which in their complex circuits and beautiful rhythm make 
up the physical world are an immediate, definite, and 
ever-renewed expression of the action of God toward a 
limited end. This is one form and a grand form of action 
by which God discloses himself to us, making paths before 
*our feet in which we can walk. But there is no reason 
why this method should be the only method. It is a 
piece of arbitrariness to assume that this is the only method, 
and must be the only one of work and of revelation, rea- 
son admitting of no other. Plainly it does admit of 
another. God declares himself to every human soul 
through every other human soul. The attributes of God 
are especially disclosed in those of men. The good 
men are the light of the world, are the sons of God. 
By so much as they are above nature do they lengthen 
our vision toward God. But this revelation may go 
farther without in any way altering its essential character, 
or losing its rational features, and that step is a miracle. 
The miracle is a flash of light in the darkness ; it is the 
perfect transparency of the natural before the supernatural 
at a single point ; it is a moral agency asserting itself in 
the height of moral activity ; it is the heart of God making 
direct answer to the heart of man. Surely this is not 
irrational, nor need we stop to give the plain reasons why 
the miracle may not often recur. We can see that the 
reasons why it may not recur are only the counterpart of 
thosewhy it may occur. It is the old stoiyof aid between 
parent and child. 

Religion lies, all of it, in this very region of the super- 



THE NATURAL AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 20/ 

natural. Hope, faith, prayer, persuasion, are all here. 
The natural covers the supernatural, as the glinting sur- 
face hides the stream from our senses. But the supernat- 
ural is every moment implied in the natural. A Christ 
that did not come forth from God would be no Christ. 
We should have only one more bewildering reflection from 
the mere face of things ; one more mirror-view of our- 
selves. What man needs is a natural presentation, yet 
one that brings with it every instant a sense of the super- 
natural, of the Divine Presence that moves behind the 
world and stirs our hopes. The natural is in accommo- 
dation to the limited scope of our powers, the supernat- 
ural to their profound reach. The natural is the atmos- 
phere that softens and diffuses the sun's too intense light. 
In a revelation of this order, a miracle which discloses for 
an instant the scope of divine grace is the highest appeal 
to our spiritual nature. Miracles are but phosphorescent 
points on the great ocean of spiritual being about us. The 
fundamental truth is the perpetual parallelism of the nat- 
ural and the supernatural ; while human life is developed 
between these two planes of activity. The quiet compla- 
cency with which men deny the supernatural shows how 
completely nature has run away in their thoughts both 
with God and man. They find no more footing for their 
own action than they do for that of God. This very 
denial is a disclosure of the need of the miracle. 

Man has fallen into the cold shadow of the natural, as 
one dwelling at the base of a snow-clad mountain may be 
hidden from the morning sun. The thoughtful mind, 
profoundly impressed with the magnitude, stability, and 
duration of the physical universe, may find no admission 
for other truths. Men have come but slowly to this im- 
pression, and it is not strange that it should for a time 



208 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

overpower them, and be attended with an intellectual 
paralysis. The difficulty is not so much that the estimate 
of the natural is excessive, as that the mind has not yet 
found within itself the proper counterpoise. 

Understanding by the natural the entire circuit of phys- 
ical things, we have one word — force — wherewith to ex- 
press physical action, thing upon thing, thing with thing. 
That which is meant by force is supersensual, a substra- 
tum of energy which sustains qualities, interactions, 
changes, and makes them more than mere illusions. Force 
is a general word, and covers an immense variety of forces ; 
or at least stands for that substantial existence which sus- 
tains an immense variety of manifestations. Physical 
things are a congeries of forces expressed in physical 
qualities, while physical laws are the modes of change in 
physical things. The one is a more statical, the other a 
more dynamical, expression of the same groups of forces. 
Yet nothing is statical. Qualities are interactions between 
things,— interactions which involve less change ; and laws 
are interactions which involve more change. Qualities, as 
those of a rock, express themselves to the senses of men 
under the conditions to which it is subjected — under di- 
verse degrees of light and different degrees of heat, under 
pressure, under the hammer, under the hand, under acids. 
If the change is manifest, the order of change we express 
as a law ; if it is slight, we regard the manifestation as one 
of qualities. By forces we mean nothing more than the 
substantial energies which qualities and changes of quali- 
ties equally imply. The groups of forces which express 
qualities we know as matter ; while the secondary energies 
involved with them, which occasion changes, more espe- 
cially change in place and form, we designate as forces 
or energies. It is not possible to separate the two in fact, 
nor distinctly in thought. 



THE NATURAL AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 209 

These forces involve each other in endless complexity, 
express themselves only in reference to each other, and 
are in constant yet changing circuits of interplay with 
each other. When we contemplate the physical world, 
rendered to the understanding in these its underlying 
forces, it offers itself as an eternal flux, the most fixed 
qualities being liable to give way to others. The ocean 
may seem quiet to the eye ; yet every drop in it is 
penetrated with forces that are seeking in vain for 
equilibrium. Heat and cold are every instant modifying 
these energies ; evaporation and rain and Avind are at 
work on them ; great currents and lesser currents, ebbs 
and tides, waves and wavelets are struggling with them ; 
animal life and human life are at sport with them ; earth- 
quakes, upheavals, and subsidences are adding to and sub- 
tracting titanic forces from them, so that equilibrium is 
something that is to be but never is present with them. 
The fixedness of the physical world on which the minds 
of men are dwelling is found after all in relatively slow 
circuits of change, characterized by a few settled terms. 
Like qualities return under like conditions, and with like 
interactions come like laws of change ; yet every change 
modifies permanently the grounds of change. Thus 
again the world is like a solar system, made up of innu- 
merable bodies. The closed circuit of each planet and 
satellite places these bodies under proximately regular 
conditions in their primary relations, though each mass 
changes within itself, though the system as a whole 
is never twice alike, nor is one of its members subjected 
a second time to exactly the same attractions. 

The world expresses its fixedness in three particulars : 
in the amounts and qualities of elements, in the laws 
of their interaction, and in the correlation of energies. 



210 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

This fixedness, which is included in the law of causation, 
and is also a truth of experience, gives to us the range of 
what is known as nature. Realized forces are present 
in fixed circuits of interaction. This fact we express 
to ourselves under the terminology of natural laws. 
Nature stands with us for the unchangeable and inevi- 
table, and is so within itself. What part does a term like 
this play in our rational lives ? Certainly it does not 
in any way take the place of mind. Thoughts make 
these fixed material facts an object of contemplation ; they 
can in no way constitute a part of them, or be subject to 
them. Forces that have but one line of unfolding and 
one circuit of results, no matter how compHcated these 
results are ; forces that are always present in some transi- 
tional stage in their effects, no matter what these effects 
are, can not be the basis of thought. Thought may reach 
this or that conclusion, may stop at this point or push 
on to another, may be correct or incorrect, carrying with 
it always the possibility of error. Thought is the action 
of an agent, not the product of a force. Regarded as an 
effect among physical effects, it has no significance ; we 
do not know why a force should produce a thought, as a 
thought has no known physical form ; or if a force does 
produce a thought, we do not know why that thought 
should have any correspondence to the events to which it 
may seem to pertain. We can give no reason why forces 
should occasion in the minds of men — if so be that men 
are men and have minds — the images of other forces. 
Nor if thoughts are so produced, can we regard them 
as either correct or incorrect. They are themselves facts, 
and facts that have sufficient causes, indeed the only 
facts that can exist under the circumstances. Nor again 
can these facts of thought, springing out of previous facts 



THE NATURAL AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 211 

and swallowed up in subsequent ones, In any way modify 
the flow of events, or at all discharge the offices of 
mind. 

Material qualities, material forces, material laws can 
subserve no purpose and play no part, till mind is present 
to conceive a purpose and supply a part. All thinking 
about things implies an agent, who, himself outside of 
things, can form ideas concerning them, and frame these 
ideas into conclusions and actions. Herein is a distinct 
activity and a distinct law. Under the image involved in 
the word, this agent is supernatural, one that rises above 
the stream of events, and makes them an object of inquiry. 
The processes of reflection to which this supernatural 
agent subjects nature, are carried forward by other laws 
than those of forces — to wit, the laws of logic. These 
laws, unlike those of forces, are not necessarily obeyed, 
are not so hidden in the very action of the agent as to 
find immediate fulfilment at every step of progress. 
These laws are found in the relations of thought ; while 
the thinking agent discerns them and obeys them with 
varying success. 

The phenomena of mind are so diverse from those of 
matter, that the two can never be expressed in the same 
terms ; they can explain each other only in that perma- 
nent contrast by which they stand forever separate from 
each other, and deepen the impression each of the other. 
On this side we have invariable forces, on that variable 
powers ; on the one hand we have things, on the other 
thoughts; here is certain development, there uncertain 
progress ; here necessity, there spontaneity ; in this direc- 
tion lie events, In that direction truths ; in this field facts 
succeed facts in unending accuracy, in that field error fol- 
lows error in unending variety, with a slow deposit of 
sound conclusions. 



212 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

All inquiry, all reasoning from the facts gained by 
inquiry, all action under the conclusions of reasoning, in- 
volve this new agency and these new laws of effort. Deny 
these, and not only does mind become unintelligible, mat- 
ter becomes so also. We know the one only in contrast 
with and in relation to the other. An endless, all-embra- 
cing continuity of forces can not be known in itself or by 
itself. It itself has not the power of knowledge, and if 
this power were granted to it, it must be lost again ; as 
Ave lose a sensation by simple prolongation. It is fitting 
that mind, to which alone belongs knowledge, should be 
termed supernatural, in contrast with that fixed physical ' 
nature which lies below it for study, comprehension, use. 
But the question is not one of words. Whether in lan- 
guage Vv'e put the spirit of man in nature or above nature, 
its functions and actions are those of spontaneity and gov- 
ernment, and so foreshadow those of the Divine mind. 
The only difference which lies between the two, an act of 
creation and an act of guidance ; a miraculous act and a 
free act, is in the manner in which they are accomplished, 
and not in their inherent rational force, nor in their rela- 
tion to nature. This difference of manner is plainly inci- 
dent to the finite nature of man on the one side, and the 
infinite nature of God on the other. Man is united by a 
definite mechanism to the physical world as a world be- 
yond him, and only partially submitted to his control ; 
while God is omnipresent in nature and is its immediate 
source. 

We are now prepared, setting the natural over against 
the supernatural, the material world over against the 
spiritual world, in a measure to comprehend both ; to give 
nature a purpose, and assign it a part. Nor need we hesi- 
tate to talk about purposes and parts, All knowledge, all 



THE NATURAL AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 213 

science, all philosophy, all religion are made up by means 
of these ideas ; the only difference between them lies in 
the boldness and scope with which these different forms 
of thought discuss these relations of thought, and spread 
them abroad over the Universe. One walks with a candle 
and inquires into narrow relations, another walks by sun- 
light and contemplates the^ broadest relations ; but all 
alike are busy with, relations of this one order — those by 
which mind unites things in mutual ministration to some 
common construction. There are no other significant re- 
lations but those of mind. Causes which tend to no con- 
struction are chaotic, have no interest for us ; while 
construction is construction only by virtue of an end. 
We may deny the end if we will, but we tacitly assume it 
again in every word we utter concerning means and 
relations. 

The material world is a third term between us and God, 
between man and man ; is a language wherein thought is 
recorded and whence thought is taken ; is a work-shop of 
forms and of material, where reason sees the work of 
reason, and can itself assay that work. Nature, to sub- 
serve this purpose, must be both fixed and flexible, and 
so it is fixed within itself and flexible under thought. It 
is the clay of the artist, neutral in its own qualities, but 
retentive of the work committed to it. It offers ready 
means to the most divine inflatus that strives to inform it 
with a spiritual life. If we have the clay, pliant, incom- 
plete, yet sensibly possessed of the transforming impulses 
already given it ; if we have the artist, renewing his labor 
from day to day, rejoicing in the fixed, rejoicing in the 
flexible, then the process going on before us presents no 
insoluble problem. The half-shaped clay without the 
artist is a strange accident ; the artist without the clay 
is a surprising and painful piece of impotence. 



214 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

The world must be comprehensible, if it is to stand on 
any terms of interaction with the thoughts of men ; and 
if it is comprehensible, it must be correspondingly fixed. 
But if it is also to yield itself to the hands of men as 
themselves agents, it must be flexible ; and flexible with- 
out losing the truth already committed to it. In meeting 
these conditions, w^e have both nature and the super- 
natural ; and as the supernatural is an airy idealism with- 
out the natural, so is the natural a dead mechanism with- 
out the supernatural. If we undertake to interpret our 
lives by a denial on either hand, we simply call out a de- 
lusive flash of light, bewildering us for a moment, and then 
expiring in darkness. Matter can not shake off the do- 
minion of reason and retain its value for reason. It must 
forever remain enriched by reason, retentive of the work 
of reason, and open to all its further uses. On no other 
terms can reason take any Interest In it. This eternal 
subjection is an Irreverslblelawof the Universe as rational, 
while the precise times and the precise ways in which 
reason will shape Its work are questions of detail. It is 
the last point of impossibility that the Infinite reason 
should become entangled in its owm means and methods, 
so as to make these, In any final w^ay, a fixed order of 
things, a closed circuit of events. This Is for reason to 
overwork itself. Reason stretches on and on ; Its revolutions 
are the revolutions of wheels that bear it forever forward. 
There is in It continuity, evolution, but no return on it- 
self. There is present with it the old, and still more 
present with it the new — a bud bursting its filaments. 
Creation as an act, an unending and growing act, accom- 
panies the Creator in all the march of years. It is easy to 
say that " the essence of a theological miracle Is the violation 
of natural law," but not easy to put back of the assertion 



THE NATURAL AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 21$ 

any conception of natural law which does not make the 
Universe sink into mechanism, and God into the supreme 
mechanist. If natural law is the action of God, inflexible 
or flexible according to the ends of reason then and there 
present ; if law is reason, then reason may as well explain 
its modifications as expound its continuity. Indeed, 
natural laws must be subjected both in their grand sweep 
and at their every turn to reason ; and to allow them to 
shake off reason is to allow them to set up against reason, 
having Avon a realm of their own. Time is not significant 
in this question. Reason is an Eternal Presence, not a 
principle, that bound fast in its first putting-forth can no 
longer be reshaped or shape that which is about it. 
When the miracle is spoken of as a violation of law, the 
mind has plainly come into subjection to the notion of 
physical laws which have a sacredness and inviolability aside 
from the purposes they are subserving. The one rule and 
the only rule that is never to be broken is that of reason, 
and this rule the miracle expresses. Physical laws are 
fixed within their own ends, and for those ends ; but to 
regard them as fixed either without ends, or beyond those 
ends, Is to oppose them to reason, is so far to dethrone 
reason, is atheism. 

We cannot grant to natural laws any existence, any mo- 
mentum, any authority beyond that which reason each 
moment concedes to them. When the question of modifi- 
cation arises, — either of a new creation or miraculous 
restoration — It Is purely one of reason, and if sufficient 
reasons call for It, there is nothing in the nature of things 
to oppose It. Things remain perfectly and forever in the 
grasp of reason. There we find them, and there we must 
leave them, or we begin at once to dethrone reason. 

Religion always plants Itself at the line of interaction 



2l6 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

along which the natural and the supernatural skirt each 
other. It has and can have no significance anywhere else. 
In this respect it is like thought in the world, and realism 
in philosophy ; it grasps double reins ; it has two terms, 
and can dispense with neither of them. Any hesitancy 
here in religion is suicidal, is the slow evaporation of the 
waters of life. When we set up matter and force as inde- 
pendent entities, over against mind, and begin to feel the 
fear of them steal over us, we shall soon bow down in 
worship before the Unknown which they embody for 
the imagination. 

Religion, as the highest form of reason, involves a na- 
ture compounded of fixed terms under fixed laws, a 
nature thereby made subject to man. Here enter the 
possibilities of action and with them its duties. Reason 
in finding a field for itself, finds one also for conscience. 
Every thought of man and every effort on his part imply 
and express this his relation to nature ; nor can the most 
subtile reasoning deny it, without in the same act denying 
itself. Religion goes farther. It affirms that nature, this 
field of thought and action, lies between us and God, that 
it is a condition of rational and responsible life provided 
by him in reference to this very life. The world is not 
looked upon as something that could not have been other- 
wise, nor as something made rational by its own unfold- 
ing, nor by man's survey of it ; but as a distinct product 
of the Supreme Reason in its provision for the finite 
reason of man. Nature is, therefore, momentarily subject 
to the divine thought and will, and its perpetuity is their 
expression ; its evolution is their evolution, its flexibility 
under the hand of man their concession. That this nature, 
so framed together for the ends of wisdom, should pre- 
sent any obstacle to wisdom, or offer it any resistance as 



THE NATURAL AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 21/ 

mere material, is absurd. It has nothing which is not 
given unto it, and all having been given it in reference to 
mind may readily and momentarily be modified in the 
same service. Matter is a bond-servant to mind, and can 
not for an instant shake off the yoke. The obscurities 
which events offer in their explanation under this view to 
the human mind are no refutation of it, since these are 
but very partial, and must be present while our knowledge 
remains of so limited an order. 

By the medium of nature we approach God, by that 
medium he approaches us. Nature in its fixedness, in its 
mobility, in its progressive unfolding, in its flexibility — for 
it has every one of these characteristics, one as truly as an- 
other — is simply a fitting term for reason, and if Reason, 
for more special and personal ends, chooses to modify its 
action, there is nothing in nature which can stand up 
against him and say. What doest thou ? Reason can be 
questioned only by reason, and reason may deal with the 
particular no less than with the general, with the unusual 
no less than with the habitual. Man can easily recognize 
the presence of the permanent and the changeable and 
the fitness of both elements, though he may not be able 
to fix the proper limits of either. That fixedness is neces- 
sary is plain, that flexibility is necessary is plain, and by 
what right does the human reason deny to the Divine Rea- 
son either condition — more especially as both conditions are 
essential, in the first place, in order that reason as reason 
may assert itself at all In the world, or have any portion 
in it, and, in the second place, in order that the world 
may lie as a field between man and God, in which they 
meet each other? In the degree in which nature is eter- 
nal and unchangeable, in that degree, taken by Itself alone, 
does it hide God from us, separate him from us ; and in 



2l8 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

the degree in which it does this, does it fail of its mission 
as a revealer of Reason to reason. By labor, faith, and 
prayer, we meet God in the world, and certainly not less 
by prayer than by labor, not less in living faith than in 
formal obedience. But these methods of action, labor and 
prayer, scientific effort and religious love, — if we choose 
so to term them — demand these two conditions, perma- 
nency and change, and our life is mutilated if we lose 
either of them. The spirit of faith, the spirit of prayer, 
the spirit of fellowship, reason with reason, is the supreme 
spirit in man, and if it is present in him, it makes a per- 
petual appeal to the Divine Spirit. Some are fearful of 
asking lest they should seem to strive to bend and warp 
the Supreme Reason. They forget that nothing is so 
flexible as reason ; they forget that there can be no term 
more significant and hence more real and influential in 
reference to divine action than this very term of trustful- 
ness. The trustful and earnest heart is a perpetual petition 
without uttering one word, and must send the force of 
prayer through and through the spiritual universe. Words 
are for men who hear them and men who utter them, not 
for God who heeds the deeper petition of the heart. 

These general relations are the relations of reason, and 
must be conceded as such, or there is no basis for religion. 
Religion in its thoughtfulness and in its love can only 
spring up along this line, where the fixed and the flexible 
meet and mingle. If Christ had stumbled at the super- 
natural, or hesitated for an instant in reference to it, he 
would have shown that he did not stand on the broad basis 
of the divine goyernment, but was entangled in the meshes 
of physical law, and had fallen into the shadow of nature ; 
that he was a scientist or a philosopher of some order, and 
not the Son of God. He makes no such mistake ; he deals 
freely with the supernatural, freely with the natural, and 



THE NATURAL AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 219 

SO has in hand the three terms of our present hfe, man, 
nature, and God. It is mere trifling to distort the facts 
of history in order to escape one miracle or another 
miracle, when we see that the grand progress of events 
include each instant this same supreme power. 

The apologetic spirit of our time in reference to the 
supernatural is the fruit of the one-sided and half-hearted 
temper of scepticism. God is to our thoughts withdraw- 
ing himself from nature, the spiritual host is in full re- 
treat, and we are being left alone with matter and 
motion. Matter and motion, what are they but one 
thought of infinite magnitude unfolding itself before the 
eyes of our reason ! The Infinite rushes in upon our 
thoughts and hearts by this work of creation, which 
springs up afresh every instant in our presence and his 
presence by the common activity of reason — the poem of 
the Great Poet passing in eternal rhythm before our eyes. 

Nature and the supernatural in the world about us 
are best interpreted to us by our own bodies. In these 
bodies mingle freely mental energies and physical forces, 
changeable purposes and fixed methods, the direction of 
reason and the limitation of matter, spirit and form. Not 
otherwise do the two flow together in the world about us. 
The supernatural is the soul of the natural, and the 
natural is the significant form of the supernatural ; and 
neither is under any bond save the bond of reason. Na- 
ture changes for and with the supernatural, and the super- 
natural rests in th€ bosom of Reason, forever above nature 
and the source of nature. Most petty and perplexing is 
the antagonism that has been set up between the two in 
the thoughts of men. It is as if we endowed language 
with forces and laws of its own as against the composite 
reason which creates and uses it ; and this on the plea 
that it is not instantly flexible to each act of reason or un- 



220 THE WORDS OF CHRIST. 

reason in each particular mind. If either of these ideas, 
if any of its primitive supplementary elements, are lost 
from the perfect circle of thought, the remainder slide 
hither and thither, like the falling fragments in a kaleido- 
scope, and we construct them, as they chance to lie, into 
varying and fantastic forms. Christ sets up his kingdom 
in spiritual power, and nature is with him only the throne 
of that pov/er. So must it be in any kingdom which is to 
be the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. 

It may be thought that the elucidation which has now 
been offered turns on a definition — the definition we have 
chosen to give of the supernatural. But definitions are of 
value as they express facts, and the question is, therefore, 
whether the nature of man does involve essentially 
supernatural elements, and so gives us terms of transition 
by which to reach the supernatural in its higher and purer 
forms in God. The truth is that the lines of thought 
which have made men sceptical of the supernatural, will, 
if consistently carried out, swxep away every rational 
basis of human life, and submerge the spiritual action of 
man as completely as that of God. It is the human and 
the divine personality in Christ, in its inseparable powers 
and essential implications, in its hold on the present and 
on the future, that makes him the way, the truth, and the 
life. Losing him, we ourselves are lost also. We w^ander 
wearily here and there, and at length lie down to die. 
Once more catching sight of him, we who were lost are 
found, and in his footsteps we follow on to life. Once 
more we hope to win in ourselves what has been won in 
him, an incarnation in the natural of the supernatural, a 
Spiritual Presence dwelling with men, men wTapped into 
a Divine Life. If Christ can not lift us to this extent, he 
can not remove our burden ; but this done, all other things 
come of themselves. 



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